Maya Bay Guide

Maya Bay was already beautiful before Hollywood found it, a cove of white sand closed in on three sides by limestone cliffs. The Beach, the 2000 film with Leonardo DiCaprio, made it the most photographed beach in Thailand, and by the 2010s it was taking about 5,000 visitors a day, with peaks of 7,000 to 8,000, most of them arriving on boats that anchored over the reef.

By 2018 the reef cover had fallen below 8%, and in June that year the park closed the bay. It stayed shut until January 2022. In that time more than 30,000 pieces of coral were replanted, about half of which survived, and the blacktip reef sharks came back within months. They now breed in the bay, and on 2 September 2026 park staff counted 278 adults near the beach, the highest count of that year's survey.

The reopening came with the rules that shape a visit now, the back-door landing, the ban on swimming, the one-hour rounds and the two-month closure every year.

Your boat ties up at the pier in Loh Samah Bay, on the back of Phi Phi Leh, and then moves off to a buoy while you walk. The boardwalk takes you through the trees and over the headland to the beach in five to ten minutes. On the sand you get about an hour. You can walk the beach, take the photograph and wade into the shallows up to your knees, and that's where you're most likely to see the sharks, small blacktips cruising close to shore.

Don't treat it as a beach day. There's no swimming, no sunbathing session, no lunch on the sand, and drones need a permit. The point is the view, and it holds up. If you want time in the water, the snorkel stops on the same loop and Bamboo Island, on the same park ticket, are where it happens.

Time of day matters more than the month. The bay opens at 07:00, and the day boats from Phuket and Krabi arrive between about 09:30 and 11:00. Before them you share the sand with a round or two of early boats, and after them it's at its busiest until mid-afternoon. If you can only day-trip, book the first departure your operator sells.

For the season, November to April is the dry season on the Andaman coast, with the calmest seas. From May the monsoon swell picks up, boats get canceled on rough days, and from 1 August to 30 September the bay is closed altogether. October, just after it reopens, is still wet, so keep a spare day if Maya Bay is the reason for your trip.

If Maya Bay is the point, stay two nights on Phi Phi Don. A day tour from Phuket or Krabi spends four or more hours on boats and lands you at Maya Bay at exactly the hour everyone else does. Sleeping on Phi Phi Don puts you on the 07:00 longtail, gives you Pileh Lagoon before the speedboats and leaves the afternoon free for the viewpoint and Long Beach.

The day trip still makes sense when your trip is based in Phuket and the days are full, or in the monsoon months, when a flexible tour you can rebook beats paying for island nights in rough weather. The Koh Phi Phi guide covers where to stay on the island and how to get there.

Almost every Maya Bay trip is a loop around Phi Phi Leh. Pileh Lagoon is the other highlight, a pool of green water enclosed by sixty-meter cliffs that the boats drift into. The tours also pass Viking Cave and stop to snorkel off Loh Samah. Longer trips add Monkey Beach on Phi Phi Don and Bamboo Island, a ring of white sand to the northeast on the same park ticket.