Perhaps your image of Thailand (before reading all our posts!) was white beaches, clear tropical water, and green jungles. You may have heard of the island of Phuket, in the southern part of the country. Since the later 1970s, Phuket has been a very popular tourist destination.
After exploring a bit of the north of the country, we wanted to experience some of Thailand’s sun, sea, and sand. We chose three nights seaside in Krabi (on the mainland across the bay from Phuket), and three more nights in a hillside resort on the southeast side of Phuket.
Here are few photos from each of these resorts.
But what we really want to share are two excursions to some remarkable island settings.
To the Phi Phi Islands
There are two Phi Phi Islands — the small one Ko Phi Phi Lee and the large one Koh Phi Phi Don. They pop out of the sea between Krabi and Phuket.
You have probably seen a very famous bay on Ko Phi Phi Lee, called Maya Bay. It was the setting for the 2000 movie The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (Rotten Tomatoes 21%!).
We’ve run into the Movie Effect a few times in our travels. People want to go experience places based on how they were portrayed in a movie they like.
Our Intrepid guide had one such story about Chiang Mai. She went to University there. Around that time, in China, there was a very popular and, reportedly, very stupid movie called Lost in Thailand. Many scenes were shot in Chiang Mai, including on the campus of the university. After they saw the movie, quite a few young Chinese tourists flocked to Chiang Mai, to the university in particular. They dressed in the university student uniforms. They even sat in on classes, ate meals in the canteen, went to the library, all the while taking selfies. They were so disruptive that Chiang Mai passed laws that make it illegal to dress in the university student uniforms if you’re not a student, and banned non-students from the campus. Breaking these laws can get you a fine of 100,000 baht (currently almost USD3,000) or even a jail sentence of up to a year. ※
The Beach had the same impact on Maya Bay. In 2018, local authorities had to shut down access to the bay for four months to help damaged coral reefs and sea life to recover from the damage caused by crowds of Movie Effect tourists.
Today, still, over 4,000 visitors arrive per day — and that’s after a crowd management system has been put into place. We were 2 out of 4,000 on our day, and we witnessed the throngs. However, the local authorities manage it all very well.
You arrive at a pier, from which you follow the continuously-flowing queue overland under the trees.
Eventually you emerge onto the beach of the bay.
You are allowed to stand in the water as long as your knees stay dry. Lifeguards, or rather bayguards, surveil constantly and call out via megaphones if anyone, overcome by Instagram hypnosis, breaks the rules.
Still, it really is a beautiful picture-postcard — OK, Instagram — place.
After working our way out of the managed crowd and back to our boat, we were offered lunch at a huge lunch-mill on Koh Phi Phi Don. The best part of lunch were the monkeys who kept their eyes on us outside the canteen.
You can’t blame this fellow since he can’t read. Or can he?
Then a bit of snorkeling amid big schools of yellow-striped fish.
And a stop at so-called Bamboo Beach. With a few fellow travelers.
But it was a really beautiful spot with glorious clear water. If and when we return to Thailand, we are definitely going to seek out more of this type of place.
Plenty of calendar-worthy scenery on the way back to port.
In Phang Nga Bay
From Phuket, we took a tour of the north part of Phang Nga Bay.
Mangrove forests edge the northern part of the Bay, which means that the water is green and opaque, unlike the crystal clear water further south.
We just can’t get enough of these limestone islands and columns that populate the bay.
One stop was another victim of the Movie Effect. This time it is the arch-villain’s island in The Man with the Golden Gun, now called James Bond Island.
(We streamed the movie a couple days later just to catch a glimpse of the island. The movie hasn’t aged well. Fortunately, the famous rock-formation appears in an early scene. David couldn’t stay awake for the entire movie.)
The island is really small, and the crowds are really large. We were encouraged to take a swim at the little beach near the famous stone column. It looked rather like taking a swim at a boat ramp.
Nonetheless, after checking out the few viewpoints of the island, we returned to the “swimming” area and waded into the water up to our calves. We enjoyed the view and did some people watching too. At one point, a tall blond man, maybe 35, approached us. He asked something in some slavic language, and gestured quite a bit. After some confusion, we realized he was asking to borrow David’s hat. So David loaned him his hat.
Smiling, the slavic fellow dashed back to the woman he was with. They talked quickly, looking around in their bags. Finally, the man pulled out a selfie stick. He headed into the water, put my hat on, and settled into the pistol-raised (selfie-stick-raised) classic pose. Photo taken, he laughed, returned my hat, we all bowed to each other, and off they went. (Sorry for the buildup without a photo of this guy.) The Movie Effect transcends frontiers!
By the way, his speaking a slavic language didn’t surprise us. We heard Russian, or Ukrainian, or similar, quite a few times during our visit to Thailand. A little research online, and we found an interesting 2024 article in Time Magazine: Thailand’s Tourist Towns Deal With Their Own Russian Invasion.
The war in Ukraine has entailed an incalculable human toll, while roiling markets, disrupting supply chains, and sending inflation soaring across the globe. But in Thailand, the two-year-old conflict is also having a profound social effect despite being over 4,000 miles away. While many Western nations have shut out Russian air travel in response to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Thailand sees Russian arrivals as key to reviving its pandemic-ravaged tourism industry. In October, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin extended 90-day visas upon arrival for Russian passports, insisting in a February interview: “We’re not part of the [Ukraine] conflict. We are neutral.”
Last year, Russians ranked top for tourist arrivals in Thailand from outside of Asia with 1.4 million visitors. Meanwhile, Russians were top overall on the southern resort island of Phuket, which has long been a favorite haunt. Last July, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Phuket to inaugurate a new consulate to cope with surging visitor numbers. A month later, the Phuket Tourist Association sent a delegation to St. Petersburg and Moscow seeking to court even more vacationers….
[S]anctions on Russian air carriers and reciprocal bans on Western airlines have slashed the destinations where Russian nationals can escape their frigid winter, making already-popular Thailand an easier choice. And then there are the not inconsiderable numbers fleeing economic doldrums and a war of choice that they had no part in choosing—not least since the Kremlin has ramped up military conscription amid mounting casualties…. As a result, the number of Russians choosing to stay in Thailand long-term is soaring….
Yet not all aspects of the phenomenon are troublesome. Other than Russians, a significant number of Ukrainians have fled their war torn nation for Thailand, potentially creating a tinderbox atmosphere. But Akachai [a Phuket police inspector] says he has not encountered a single skirmish or negative incident between the two nationalities in Phuket. Yury Rozhkov, 46, a Russian national who works for a travel agency in Bangkok, says he regularly meets Ukrainians staying in his apartment building and relations are nothing but cordial.
“They understand it’s Putin, it’s not Russia, Russian people are different,” he says. “And I’m sure Russians who have money to travel to Thailand do not support Putin and the war in Ukraine.”
We stopped for lunch at a so-called floating village, Koh Panyee. It’s actually built on stilts against a huge cliff. Javanese fishermen established the village late in the 18th century.
In addition to its setting, one thing that is interesting is that this is a Muslim village. You can see the domes of the mosque against the cliff.
The further south we traveled in Thailand, the more mosques we saw. Malaysia, just to the south, is predominantly Muslim. Modern national borders usually don’t reflect the nuanced history of fluid communities.
Koh Panyee is still a fishing village, but it is also a tourist village. Most of the men were out fishing when we visited. Many of the women worked in souvenir stands all along the walkways within the village. Lots of souvenir stands! We were a bit disappointed not to be offered more cultural information. But lunch was pretty good, if not particularly healthy, thanks to a few fried options.
The next stop was the most fun: a bit of sea kayaking around, under and in some of the rocky islands.
Since we tourists would just cause mayhem, a captain-rower powered each kayak. We could settle back and enjoy the scenery.
Super end for a fun day on the water.
February 2025