Children of The Sea 7: Drops from the Angel

Kolatoli beach is not a very well known tourist spot. It’s not a place where every tourist goes. In fact, I never even heard about this place before year 2004. None of my journey mates have heard about this place as well. However, I knew what I was doing, and we were slowing approaching the place.

The evening was calm and quiet. No place in Bangladesh is as crowded as Dhaka. Only a few other Rickshaws could be seen. There was no turmoil, no loud chattering, no cars, no stupid pedestrians—a completely peaceful environment.

So what’s so special about Kolatoli? It’s like any other beach of Coxsbazar, with the only exception being the “Angel Drop” restaurant. This is hanging restaurant, established way above the sea level. The foundation of the two storied building must be really strong, as strong waves continuously hit the columns on which the building stands. According to the owner, only a Tsunami will be able to break the columns! It’s been five years since the restaurant has been established, and it never got affected by waves.

We had to take a hanging mini-bridge to get inside. The kitchen as well as the order taking place is situated in the ground floor. Leaving the kitchen behind, we went forward and sat in some chairs and benches at the rear end of the ground floor.

After sitting in the chairs, we were confronted with a jaw dropping, awesome view of the sea. The moon was up, and the reflection on the waves was beyond description. When I first came here, I knew I could watch forever, and that feeling didn’t change a bit. Every wave had something new in it. Clichéd this may be, but I reassert, the sea never gets old, and one can never get bored of the sea.

Me, Pintu and Sujit sat there, while the others went off to a special mission. Before they left, we ordered dinner, and the guys informed us that it’d take at least an hour to get the meal prepared. We were happy, because we knew that the mission would take some time to accomplish. We ordered a Red Snapper, and two servings of Prawn Masala, with steamed rice and Sprite. We wanted fried rice, but it was not available. Red Snapper is a very tasty sea fish. I tried it before in Saltz at Dhaka, and I loved it. That one was not fresh, but I hoped that the coxsbazar one would be a bit fresher. The best thing about this fish is that it has very less amount of scales. So the tiresome process of dissecting scales from the meat is not there.

I was feeling a bit anxious and disturbed, because I knew that my cell phone could go off any moment. Since I found out about the absence of charger, I kept it turned off. But now, here in Angel Drop, I really needed the cell phone for coordinating the mission. That was when I received a call from April. She started what she almost always does..whining and complaining. This time it was some audacious behavior of her sister, and as a result, her not returning home at night. I tried to inject some sense in to her, but she refused to understand. After a while, seeing that the discussion is going nowhere and I am losing a lot of precious sea dances, I brought out the plea of charge exhaustion and hung up. Hehe…I kind of enjoy listening to people. Trust me; I do listen to people a lot. I am not always the talkative kind that many of my friends know.

At around 10, we were informed that food was ready, and will be served shortly. I called up Tushar and came to know that the mission was successful, and they are returning. But still it’d take at least 10 minutes for them to arrive. Fortunately, the food was served five minutes later, and Ashique, Tushar and Murshid joined us before we three finished the whole fish.

The food was excellent, and as I am writing this, I am getting hungry and I am also experiencing the tingling of saliva. Who knew that rice, cooked fish and tomato sauce could taste so great? The prawn item wasn’t that great, but I absolutely loved the red snapper.

After dinner, we spent some more time sitting and enjoying ourselves. We had a round of coffee before dinner. We again ordered coffee, which further inflated our food expenditure. We spent a lot of money that night, for satisfying our appetite. A lot…

At around 11 PM, we came out of the place. We wanted to stay more, but all of us were really tired from the journey. The guys bought cigarettes and we headed back towards the cottage.

The end of our first day at Coxsbazar was not far away…

To be continued

Sorry folks, no pics for this one! Sujit forgot to take his camera along, and that was the only one we had.