(25 Sep 2017) On the miles-long beach that makes Sugondha point Bangladesh's top tourist destination, thousands of people picnicked and splashed in the water on Monday.
There are balloons and cotton candy for the kids, fried snacks and tender coconuts for the grown-ups.
Families sit under umbrellas. Young couples find quiet moments.
Travel just 40 kilometres (25 miles) south along a scenic coastal road amid lush green paddy fields, and a different scene emerges.
Vast areas are now entirely taken over by a sea of makeshift bamboo and plastic tents.
These are homes for many of the more than 430,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh with stories of terrible persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
The new arrivals spill out of refugee camps for Rohingya that have existed in this border district since the 1990s.
But no previous exodus has been as enormous as the one that began on 25 August, when the latest convulsion of violence erupted in Myanmar.
The latest refugee flood was unceasing for the first three weeks as Myanmar troops embarked on what they called "cleansing operations" to target Rohingya insurgents after a series of coordinated attacks on dozens of police posts in Rakhine state.
The United Nations described it as "textbook ethnic cleansing."
Aid agencies say the scale of the flow caught them off-guard and left them scrambling to scale up relief efforts quickly.
The tide of refugees has turned into a trickle for now, but they still come - by land and by boat on the Naf River, which runs between Myanmar and Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
Most are starving and sick.
Residents of Cox's Bazar have helped with relief efforts like handing out food and water. But they are growing nervous about a future with so many new arrivals.
The colourful street bazaar known as the Burmese market sits at the entrance to the beach, which locals proudly note is the longest natural sea beach in the world.
Shopkeepers are almost all Bangladeshi, but the stores are packed with goods from Myanmar.
The market is crowded and it's dusty outside a row of hotels.
Open drains criss-cross the streets and rubbish sits piled on street corners.
There are few cars, but the traffic is chaotic - a crush of cycle rickshaws, tuk-tuks and two-wheelers.
Cox's Bazar isn't rich by any means.
Apart from tourism, which mostly attracts Bangladeshi visitors, small businesses and government jobs are the main sources of income.
People worry what the population explosion will mean for the already low wages many Bangladeshis here count on.
Meanwhile at the beach, the heart of Cox's Bazar, life remains largely untouched by the influx of Rohingya refugees down the coast.
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