Maya Bay

Maya Bay is the cove on the west side of Phi Phi Leh that Danny Boyle filmed in 2000, and the reason half the boats leaving Phuket and Krabi each morning are pointed this way. Limestone walls close around three sides to about a hundred meters, the sand is powder white, and the water inside the bay holds a color that makes photographs look like they have been pushed. It earned its fame and then very nearly lost it. By 2018 as many as 5,000 visitors a day had killed most of the reef, and Thailand closed the bay outright for four years.

What reopened in 2022 is a managed site rather than a free-for-all, and the rules are the thing to plan around. Boats no longer enter the bay itself; they dock at a pontoon on the eastern side of the island and you walk through to the beach on a boardwalk. Swimming inside the bay is not permitted, numbers and dwell time are capped, and rangers enforce both. I'd take the earliest departure offered rather than the convenient one, because the first arrivals get something close to the empty cove and the ten o'clock boats do not.