Maya Bay

Where it sits. Maya Bay is a shallow inlet on the western side of Ko Phi Phi Le, the smaller and uninhabited of the two main Phi Phi islands, in Krabi Province in the Andaman Sea. The island is a block of Permian limestone about six and a half square kilometres in area, and the bay is a near-enclosed basin: cliffs rise 100 metres or more on three sides, leaving only a narrow western mouth broken by rock stacks. The beach is a strip of white sand a few hundred metres long, backed by a shelf of jungle. Ko Phi Phi Le has no accommodation, no roads and no permanent residents; the closest beds are on Ko Phi Phi Don two kilometres north, and the whole group lies inside Hat Noppharat Thara–Mu Ko Phi Phi National Park. The other features of the island are Pileh Lagoon, a flooded cleft on the eastern shore with vertical walls and turquoise water, and Viking Cave in the northeast, where swiftlet nests are still harvested on bamboo scaffolds by licensed collectors, and where old drawings of boats mark the walls.

On screen, and what it cost. In 1998 and 1999 Twentieth Century Fox filmed Danny Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's novel The Beach here, with Leonardo DiCaprio. The production wanted a wider, more open crescent than the bay actually had, so crews cleared native beach vegetation, levelled dunes and planted coconut palms that had never grown there. Thai academics and conservation groups sued, arguing that a national park had been landscaped for a film set and that the department that approved it had exceeded its powers. The litigation ran through the Thai courts for well over a decade and ended with rulings that the filming had damaged the park and that permission should not have been granted; the studio had posted a bond and funded rehabilitation, but the dune system did not come back as it was. The film opened in 2000 and made the bay globally famous, which turned out to be the more serious impact. By the mid-2010s Maya Bay was taking something in the order of several thousand visitors and a couple of hundred speedboats a day into a basin the size of a few football pitches.

The closure. On 1 June 2018 Thailand's Department of National Parks closed Maya Bay to visitors. The stated reason was that hard coral cover in the bay had collapsed — surveys put losses at the great majority of the original reef — from anchor damage, propeller wash, sunscreen and trampling. The closure was announced as four months and then extended repeatedly, in the end lasting three and a half years. Marine scientists from Kasetsart University ran a coral restoration programme through it, growing and transplanting tens of thousands of staghorn fragments onto frames in the bay. Blacktip reef sharks, which had largely vanished, returned in numbers large enough that pupping was recorded in the shallows.

How it works now. The bay reopened on 1 January 2022 under a completely different regime, and understanding it matters more than any other practical detail here:

• Boats no longer enter Maya Bay at all. They moor at a floating pontoon in Loh Samah Bay on the opposite side of the island, and visitors cross on a boardwalk and steps through the interior.
• Swimming in the bay is banned. You can stand in the shallows for a photograph; you cannot get in the water.
• Numbers are capped and released in timed slots, on the order of a few hundred people per hour, with time on the sand limited to about an hour.
• The bay closes completely every year from 1 August to 30 September, and additional closures are ordered when reef monitoring calls for them.

Announcements are made by the park department at short notice, so check the current status before booking anything built around the bay.

What you actually see today. It is still an extraordinary piece of geology: a white floor of sand under a ring of dripping grey karst, with the light in the basin turning from green to deep blue as the tide moves. The crowd is real but managed, and the boardwalk arrival across the island is a genuine improvement on being dropped from a bow. Snorkelling now happens at Loh Samah, Nui Bay and around Bida Nok rather than in the bay itself, and the reef there is in better condition than most divers expect.

Getting there and timing. Day boats run from Ko Phi Phi Don, from Ao Nang and Krabi on the mainland, and from Phuket, and speedboat tours take between one and two hours each way. National park entry is charged separately from the tour price. The Andaman dry season, roughly November through April, gives the calmest crossings; the southwest monsoon from May brings swell and cancellations. Nothing about the site is wheelchair friendly: the crossing involves boat transfers, steps and uneven boardwalk.