St Martin's Island was a special experience. One day we could not move one centimeter without being followed by a large quantity of islanders. The other day we would be totally alone, having 10 kilometers of beach entirely to ourselves.
On the island there is no electricity. Experiments are done with windmills and solar cells but to no wide extent or success yet. Some people have ideas about burning coconuts. However, at the time being, just the hotels have a generator and they only operate it between 6 and 10 PM. After that, you can have a romantic tête-à-tête with an oil lamp. These evenings enabled us to ameliorate our bridge capacities a whole lot.

The island has only one small town and a little over 5,000 inhabitants. Its area is only 8 square kilometers. Most of the inhabitants are fishermen and they sell their fresh products every morning on the beach and transport it probably also to the main land. Part of the fish is dried and hanging in the sun until a hungry customer will buy it.
On the beach, we found many beautiful shells. The beach was also covered by crab traces, and often we saw a small crab running sideways to seek cover. 
The island is so small, that you can walk around it in four hours, which we did. On our journey, we saw many interesting things, like cows, a snake and a dead sea turtle. 

There is a hatchery on the island for sea turtle eggs. The sea turtles are left only with a small population and come in the night to the beach to lay there eggs. These eggs however are threatened by several things, one being the many stray dogs, that dig the eggs out. 
Now the staff members of the hatchery dig the nests out and raise the in the center. As soon as the little turtles are born and strong enough, they are released again. We went to take a look but there was not much more to see than some small sand heaps, that hid the eggs. Only after I had taken a picture, I noticed the sign that it was "very strictly forbidden to take pictures." I still cannot see what was so interesting or secret about the sand heaps; maybe some other business was going on there that did not need publicity; not that any tourist was in sight during the days that we were on the island.

Child labor is still common in Bangladesh. On the island, we saw many children carrying heavy loads, selling dried fish, helping in the hotels, minding the cattle and chasing the tourists (in this case, us) trying to sell anything from their services as a tour guide to sea shells and coconuts. Rice production is the next business on the island after fishing, and the rice is put simply on the sand of the beach to dry.