Maya Bay closed indefinitely (famous beach in Southern Thailand)

I am writing about this because of the fact that in my last article I was speaking of the DiCaprio film where most of the film was shot on this very island. Earlier this year the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and that National Park service decided that the popular tourist island was going to be closed to all visitors indefinitely.

Now when i say indefinitely what I really should be saying is "not near long enough for it to make any difference" and there are many reasons why that is the case. There is lots of finger-pointing about why the nature has been so annihilated on and around Maya Bay, one of which is to attempt to blame the movie "The Beach" and even to blame Leo directly, which is absurd because the word on the street is that they film producers spend an absolute ton of money repairing any damage they caused and were not permitted to leave until it was signed off by the National Park service - which probably isn't saying much because those guys are exceptionally easy to bribe.

Here is the real reason why the area is polluted, and that picture isn't even that busy of a day. On a truly busy day, you can expect to see twice this many boats from about 10am to 4pm and this carries on for pretty much the entire year. While masses of people coming and going isn't necessarily detrimental in itself, the exptreme popularity of the island combined with the fact that the National Park Service has a pretty horrible reputation for not really doing anything and by actually stealing a lot of the park entrance fee money.

I am not going to pretend that I know the exact figures, but in an unannounced raid the military took over operations of the national park fee collection for a couple weeks and discovered that the amount of money that had historically been turned in by park officials (and their bosses) was about 10% of what was actually being collected. Further investigation found that the big boss of the entire operation was found to have a fleet of luxury cars, overseas houses, an absolute fortune in cash, and a private helicopter. This position doesn't pay anywhere near enough to afford any of these things.

Anyway, I am getting off topic here (corruption really boils my blood)

The point is that shutting down an ecosystem for half a year and expecting nature to completely revitalize itself when coral formations take many years to form, is a complete absurd strategy.

The only way forward, the only way to restore Maya Bay (and a plethora of other similar beaches in Thailand) is to develop some sort of sustainable tourism practices as well as serious fines for doing really stupid things like anchoring in the middle of a known coral formation. (I have witnessed this while i was a dive instructor, I was nearly hit by the anchor).

Basically, high season will be upon us soon and the local businesses are going to start crying about how so much of their business depends on this beach being open and they will not be wrong.. However, i think a much bigger factor is that the government (and the greedy fingered pilferers of the fund) will lose a huge amount of money considering that hundreds of thousands of people visit this island every season at the price of about $20 each.

No matter how long they close it, until something is done about irresponsible tourism (and especially the tour operators as well as lazy National Park staff) nothing is going to change in the long term and this is just a publicity stunt.