The Phi Phi Islands are six limestone islands in the Andaman Sea off southern Thailand, sheer grey cliffs rising out of turquoise water, and one of them holds Maya Bay, the cove ringed by cliffs on three sides that the film The Beach made famous in 2000. The cliffs were a coral reef around 250 million years ago, lifted above the sea and carved by rain and waves into towers, arches and caves, and the islands are hopped between by longtail boat, the long wooden boats with coloured ribbons snapping at the bow that locals have used for generations. Phi Phi Don is the inhabited one, and a steep stair-and-path climb from Tonsai leads to the lookout where its shape gives itself away: a thin waist of sand pinched between two bays, with the limestone humps of the island at either end. In December 2004 the tsunami struck that neck from both bays at once and destroyed most of the buildings on it; the island was rebuilt.
Phi Phi Leh, the smaller island, is uninhabited and is where the boats go. Maya Bay was so overrun after the film that Thailand closed it in 2018 and let it recover for three and a half years; since it reopened, boats dock at a pier on the sheltered side and you walk in from behind the cliffs, and swimming is banned, because the shallows have become a nursery for blacktip reef sharks that returned while the beach was closed, so visitors wade knee-deep and watch the small sharks pass. Kayaks go into the narrow water alleys between the karst towers, where the cliffs close in overhead and the sea goes still and green, and into Pileh Lagoon, an enclosed pool of water so clear the boats seem to float on air. Snorkelling off the boats finds coral gardens, clownfish and turtles in a few metres of water. Phi Phi is the picture of Thailand that everyone carries, and the sharks in Maya Bay are the proof that it got a second chance.