Maya Bay spent three and a half years without a single visitor. In June 2018 Thailand's Department of National Parks closed the 250-metre cove on Ko Phi Phi Leh outright, after surveys recorded severe damage across its shallow reef. It reopened in January 2022 under a management regime that still shapes every Phi Phi private longtail boat to Maya Bay with snorkeling tour running today. Boats no longer enter the bay at all. Ko Phi Phi Leh is uninhabited. It sits inside Hat Noppharat Thara–Mu Ko Phi Phi National Park, declared in 1983, and its cliffs are Permian limestone laid down some 250 million years ago, later folded and weathered into near-vertical walls that rise roughly 100 metres from the Andaman Sea. Long before film crews arrived, the island was worked by licensed collectors who climbed bamboo scaffolding inside Viking Cave to harvest swiftlet nests. The cave takes its name from the ships scratched onto its walls in ochre. Those nests still command extraordinary prices in Chinese markets. The bay entered global consciousness in 2000, when Danny Boyle's The Beach reached cinemas. The production's reshaping of the dune behind the sand triggered a legal case that ran for years through Thai courts. Visitor numbers followed the film: by 2018, as many as 5,000 people and 200 boats a day were arriving at a beach 250 metres long, and Koh Phi Phi longtail boat trips had become the island's economic spine. Recovery has been deliberate. Nursery-grown staghorn fragments have been transplanted across the seabed since 2021, and blacktip reef sharks — nearly absent at the height of the crowds — now pup in the shallows in numbers rangers count by drone. Access runs through a floating pier at Loh Samah Bay on the eastern side, then a boardwalk over the ridge. The 400 THB national park conservation fee charged to foreign adults funds that work. Swimming inside the cove is restricted to a marked zone, and the reef time happens elsewhere — in Pileh Lagoon, off Loh Samah, around Bamboo Island — which is why Phi Phi private longtail boat to Maya Bay with snorkeling tours are built as circuits rather than single stops. The vessel itself explains the rest. The ruea hang yao, or longtail, is a shallow-draft wooden hull with a truck engine mounted on a pivot and a bare propeller shaft trailing behind it. It draws less than a metre. It can work in close against karst walls and thread channels that larger speedboats must give a wide berth.