Beach + Turquoise Waters

In the film "The Beach", Leonardo De Caprio begins with a monologue in which he talks about people who travel but want wherever they go to have all the comforts of home and asks "what is the point of that?" It is the start of the films initial theme that everyone tries to do something different but everyone always ending up doing the same. Is it ironic then that the location they used for the isolated, secret beach in the film was perhaps the place we have found so far that is most symbolic of everyone doing the same thing?!

The Beach, or Maya Bay to give it it's proper name, is on the island of Koh Phi Phi Leh, part of a national marine park just 10 minutes boat ride from Koh Phi Phi Don - its sister island which is not part of the marine park and is therefore free from development restrictions and so provides the location for the majority of hotels and guest houses in the area. Koh Phi Phi Don is also home to countless tour providers offering boat rides around the marine park, and more specifically to see "The Beach". One of the things Mandi and I have found in the past when travelling is that we aren't great at enjoying group tours. It's not that we aren't sociable and don't get on with the other people (at least I hope that isn't the case), it's just that as a group, you are restricted by a timetable and the schedule of your guide. You can't always just wait somewhere to try and get a picture, or skip past something that you're not too interested in. We have therefore gradually adopted an approach that if it is possible to do it ourselves we generally will do. In the case of Maya Bay, i'm very glad that was the case. Rather than using one of the local tours, we instead got up early and wandered to the pier where we paid a longtail boat owner to take us over. We arrived just after 7 in the morning and were fortunate enough to find that hardly anyone else was there and so we had a couple of hours to take pictures and enjoy the surroundings in relative peace.

It is no surprise that Maya Bay was chosen as the location for the film, it is close to being a perfect beach - calm turqoise waters turning to clear waves that gently wash up onto a white sand beach in a bay almost completely enlosed by high sided rock faces that cradle the entire setting. Unfortunately, this natural beauty, along with the fame it now has for being "The Beach" meant that by the time we left at 9 o'clock in the morning, as the first tours arrived, it was quickly filled by hundreds more people and the perfection of the scene vanished under a blanket of towels, snorkel masks and far too many speedos!

Whilst on Phi Phi, we also took the opportunity to get in some more diving. The marine park has some fantastic dive sights and so we went out for a couple of dives with a local company. It was great to be back under the water again (even though it had been less than a few days since we last dived - we're definitely hooked!) and the dive sites around Phi Phi certainly lived up to expectations. I do have to say though that before we arrived, we also heard that some of the dive companies on Phi Phi are, well if they were plumbers or electricians they would be referred to as cowboys! Unfortunately, we too found that the company we went out with was nowhere near as good as Planet Scuba who we were diving with on Koh Tao. Maybe we just got a bad company on Phi Phi or maybe we were just spoiled with how good our instructor, Barry, had been on Koh Tao, but whatever the reason, if I were advising anyone who is going to Thailand to scuba dive in the future, I would definitely recommend going to Koh Tao to learn, but then making time to go to Phi Phi to just dive in some of the amazing sites (once you know what you are doing). One other thing that we saw on our scuba diving trip was Maya Bay again. When we had a break for lunch, the dive boat anchored in a bay on Koh Phi Phi Leh that was close to Maya Bay, and it was possible to swim to a cave that provided a passageway through, so we decided to nip back and have another look - that was just after midday, and by that point, it was even more rammed that it had been the day before at 9. There were easily more people per square metre on that small beach than anywhere else we have been on the trip. Obviously, it is a little disheartening to see such a perfect scene becoming so ridiculously overcrowded, but there are some good points. Because "The Beach" is such an attraction, people always go there and so often don't bother to visit the other bays and beaches in the marine park. Therefore, although Maya Bay may be suffering from the effects of tourism, its huge draw protects the rest of the marine park from damage. The second positive is that it brings money into an island that is still recovering from being devastated in the 2004 Tsunami.

People don't visit Maya Bay just because it was the setting for a film, they visit because it is such a beautiful place to see - the film just happened to act as the biggest advertising campaign for the beauty of the area - and that is something that the message in "The Beach" overlooks when it critisises people for doing the same thing. The reason so many people go to the same places is because they are places that are well worth seeing. That is what makes them tourist attractions, and although it would be great to find somewhere as fantastic as Maya Bay, or Torres del Paine, Iguacu Falls, Salar de Uyuni or Easter Island that nobody else knows about, the chances of doing that on such a well mapped and well explored planet are pretty remote, and to miss out on seeing the wonderful places we do know about just because lots of other people have also been there and done that, well, what would be the point in that? Just make sure you get to them early!

Steve