Snorkeling and Maya Bay in Koh Phi Phi

In the afternoon of our second day in Phi Phi, we wanted to explore more of the islands and mangroves we weren’t able to reach by kayak, including the famous Maya Bay which was the setting of Leonardo DiCaprio’s movie ‘The Beach’.

We booked a snorkeling half day trip from 14.00h-19.30h for 400 BTH p.p. In our long-tail boat, we were approximately 10-15 people, which was a pleasant group size. First stop on the program was another Monkey Beach in the southern part of Koh Phi Phi Don. Honestly, we weren’t big fans of the monkey beaches in general as they attracted too many visitors on the small bays. There was no time or space for relaxation because of too many tourists and because you had to watch out for the monkeys! Some guys brought bananas and, as you can imagine, giving a banana once means the monkeys won’t get off you until the last banana or anything eatable in fact is in their possession, even if it involved chasing around tourists with bags, which is actually less funny than it sounds and a pretty scary experience for the victim.. ?

We made three stops for snorkeling, including a stop at Maya Bay. The beach is closed off at the moment to allow the coral to recover from tourism, but they allow boats to stop about 100m in front the bay in the open water. After seeing amazing coral and fish at Koh Rok, we were quite disappointed by the snorkeling in Koh Phi Phi. The water is polluted with plastic and carton floating around and a lot of the coral is destroyed with very little fish, which made me not go into the water anymore in the second and third snorkelling stop. Besides the fact that there wasn’t much to see, it didn’t feel right to me to support snorkelling in areas which evidently suffered and needed recovery.

One highlight though was watching the sunset on the water from the boat while enjoying some fresh pineapple. And once it got dark, we went for a last time into the water to see glowing plankton! That was a first time experience for us and it was definitely worth overcoming the initial hesitation of jumping of the boat into the open water with absolute darkness around you!