Maya Bay

Maya Bay is on Phi Phi Leh, an uninhabited limestone island in the Andaman Sea between Phuket and Krabi. The bay is enclosed on three sides by cliffs a hundred metres high, with a narrow entrance and a small beach at its head.

It is the clearest case anywhere of a beach being loved to destruction and then rescued. The 2000 film *The Beach* was shot here, with production alterations to the dune vegetation that caused a legal case at the time. Visitor numbers then rose to something like five thousand people and hundreds of boats a day; anchors and fins destroyed the great majority of the bay's coral. Thailand closed Maya Bay entirely in June 2018, and it stayed closed for three and a half years.

It reopened in January 2022 under a different regime. Boats no longer enter the bay at all — they moor on the far side of the island and visitors walk through on a boardwalk. Numbers are capped, visits are timed, swimming in the bay is prohibited, and the beach closes seasonally each year for further recovery. Blacktip reef sharks have returned in numbers and coral has been replanted; recovery is real and partial.

The bay itself is fine white sand with shallow turquoise water and near-vertical rock on three sides. There are toilets and a ranger station behind the beach and nothing else. Phi Phi Don, the inhabited island next door, takes all the accommodation and most of the noise; Maya Bay is on Phi Phi Leh, which has nobody living on it and never has.

You walk in over a boardwalk, stand on the sand for a limited time, and do not enter the water. Those rules are why there is anything left to look at, and anyone who finds them excessive should read what the bay looked like in 2017.