James Bond Island

Where it sits. Khao Phing Kan is a small limestone island in Phang Nga Bay, roughly 40 kilometres northeast of Phuket and about 25 kilometres south of Phang Nga town, inside the boundaries of Ao Phang Nga National Park. The Thai name means something close to "hills leaning against each other" and describes the island's defining feature: a slab of rock that sheared away from the cliff behind it and now rests against it at an angle, leaving a wedge-shaped slot a person can walk into. Off the northern shore, standing alone in shallow jade-coloured water about 40 metres out, is Ko Tapu, the "nail island" — a tapering limestone stack roughly 20 metres tall and only about four metres across at the waterline, distinctly wider at the top than at the base.

The geology that made it. The bay's towers are Permian limestone, laid down as reef and lagoon sediment somewhere between 250 and 300 million years ago when this corner of Southeast Asia lay under a warm shallow sea. Tectonic collision later raised the beds and fractured them along near-vertical joints; rain and then seawater dissolved those fractures into the tower karst that Phang Nga shares with Guilin and with Vietnam's northern coast. Ko Tapu's pinched waist is tidal work: seawater carrying dissolved carbon dioxide attacks limestone hardest in the intertidal band, so the stack is being carved from the middle outward. The same chemistry has hollowed neighbouring islands into hongs — collapsed cave chambers open to the sky, entered by kayak through tunnels that only clear at low tide.

On screen. The island became "James Bond Island" in late 1974, when The Man with the Golden Gun — the ninth Eon production and Roger Moore's second outing as 007 — used it as the private hideaway of the assassin Francisco Scaramanga, played by Christopher Lee. In the film the island is placed in Chinese waters, and the solar plant Scaramanga has built to exploit the stolen Solex agitator is a set dressed onto the beach, with a retractable dish and a moulded rock face added by production designer Peter Murton's crew. Ko Tapu is the most reproduced image the series ever took from a real landscape: it stands offshore behind the two men as they walk out for their duel. The funhouse in which that duel is actually fought was a Pinewood interior, not anything on this island.

The rest of the Thai unit's work. The production spent several weeks in the country and used it for more than the island:

• the beach, cliff face and offshore stack at Khao Phing Kan and Ko Tapu, standing in for Scaramanga's island
• Bangkok's canals for the long-tail boat chase, filmed in the klongs on the Thonburi side of the river
• the AMC Hornet's corkscrew jump across a broken bridge, staged over a canal outside the capital and calculated in advance by computer

What you actually see today. The landing is a wet one onto a strip of coarse sand perhaps a hundred metres long, backed by the leaning slab and a low cliff pocked with solution hollows. Souvenir stalls run by licensed vendors line the back of the beach, selling shell jewellery and printed sarongs, and there is a small shaded platform where guides gather groups. National park staff collect an entry fee at the pier or on the boat. Landing on Ko Tapu itself has long been prohibited, and boats are kept back from its base after concerns about erosion and about the damage caused by hundreds of hulls a day nudging in for photographs. The rock is best seen from the western end of the beach in the first two hours of daylight, when the light comes across rather than behind it.

Getting there and timing. Longtail boats leave from Tha Dan and Surakul piers in Phang Nga town and take about 45 minutes through the mangrove channels; speedboats run from Ao Po and Rassada on Phuket in around 40 minutes, and larger day boats come from Krabi and Ko Yao Noi. The dry northeast monsoon from November to April gives the calmest water and the clearest air; May to October brings squalls, swell and reduced visibility, though the karsts look their most dramatic under storm light. Boats from Phuket converge between about 10am and 2pm, so an early departure or a late-afternoon trip changes the experience entirely. Most tours pair the island with Ko Panyi, the Muslim fishing village built on stilts against a cliff, and with the sea caves at Ko Panak and Ko Hong, where the tide dictates whether the tunnels are passable at all.