The Phi Phi Islands are six limestone islands in the Andaman Sea off southern Thailand, grey cliffs a hundred metres high standing straight out of turquoise water. The rock is an old coral reef. It grew here about 250 million years ago, was lifted out of the sea, and rain and waves have been cutting it into towers, caves and overhangs ever since. You get between the islands in a longtail, the long wooden boat with coloured ribbons snapping at the bow that families here have used for generations. It goes slowly enough for you to trail a hand in the water, and it is thin enough to duck into inlets the bigger boats cannot reach. Kayaks go further in again, into alleys of water between the karst towers where the cliffs lean in overhead and the sea turns still and green.
Phi Phi Don is the inhabited island, and a steep climb of stairs and path from Tonsai gives its shape away: a thin waist of sand pinched between two curving bays. From up there the twin arcs of beach glow at either end. That neck is also why the island has a before and an after. In December 2004 the tsunami came into both bays at once, met in the middle over the low sand and flattened most of what stood there. The town was rebuilt afterwards. The boats run south to Phi Phi Leh, which nobody lives on, for Maya Bay — the cove walled on three sides that The Beach made famous in 2000. The fame nearly finished it, and Thailand shut the bay in 2018 for three and a half years. Now the boats tie up at a pier on the sheltered side and you walk in from behind the cliffs. Blacktip reef sharks came back to pup in those shallows while the beach was closed, so you wade in no further than your knees and watch the young ones pass.