Thailand Guide
Southern Thailand: the Andaman coast
Ko Phi Phi Leh
Address: 20min boat ride north of Ko Phi Phi Don
More rugged than its twin, Ko Phi Phi Don, and a quarter the size, KO PHI PHI LEH is the number-one day-tripping destination from Phi Phi Don, and a feature of all snorkelling tours out of Phuket and Ao Nang. It is very scenic indeed, and world famous, following its starring role in the film The Beach, so expect huge crowds, a plethora of discarded polystyrene lunch boxes, and a fair bit of damage to the reefs from the carelessly dropped anchors of tourist and fishing boats. The best way to appreciate the island is probably on one of the overnight camping and snorkelling trips from Phi Phi Don.
Most idyllic of all the island's bays is Ao Maya on the southwest coast, where the water is still and very clear and the coral extremely varied; Ao Phi Leh, an almost completely enclosed east-coast lagoon of breathtakingly turquoise water, is also beautiful. Nearby, the Viking Cave gets its misleading name from the scratchy wall-paintings of Chinese junks inside, but more interesting than this 400-year-old graffiti is the bird's-nesting that goes on here: rickety bamboo scaffolding extends hundreds of metres up to the roof of the cave, where intrepid chao ley sea gypsy harvesters spend the day scraping the unfeasibly valuable nests made by tiny sea-swifts off the rockface for export to specialist Chinese restaurants all over the world.