Kuakata is named after a hole in the ground. Rakhine families fleeing the Burmese conquest of Arakan landed on this sandbar on what is now Bangladesh's southern coast around 1784 and found eighteen kilometres of open shore and nothing to drink, so they dug wells — kua — and the name stuck: the dug well. What brings people here today is not the fresh water but the sea. The beach bulges south into the Bay of Bengal on a shallow curve, and that convex shape opens an arc of horizon wide enough for the sun to lift out of the water at dawn and sink back into it at dusk, both from the same sand. The double act is seasonal, though, which the brochures rarely mention. Only from about November to early February does the sun rise far enough south to clear open water; by June it comes up far to the north-east, behind the tree line, and only the sunset still belongs to the sea.
At low tide the water pulls back and leaves a wide, hard flat of grey sand. Buffalo come down from the villages to graze on stranded seaweed, and thousands of red crabs pour out of their burrows and cover the surface in shifting patches of red. Fishing boats lie tilted at the waterline, and the horse carts start working the sand. On the Kartik full moon each November, thousands of Hindu pilgrims camp on this sand for the three-day Rash Mela and wade in together at first light. But the beach is losing ground. The bay is steadily taking the planted forest belt that shelters it, and at Gangamati, at the eastern end, you walk through bleached trunks and torn-out root plates of drowned kewra trees lying where the tide left them.