We got up and went to shore for brunch. We walked through the grouping of haphazard buildings over to the other side of the isthmus, called Maya Bay. The cruising guide had said that Lo Dalam Bay wasn’t a very good place to anchor, but it looked a whole lot better to us than Ton Sai bay. There were only a handful of boats in there, as opposed to the non-stop boat traffic in Ton Sai bay.

We walked along the shore of Lo Dalam bay until we saw a restaurant on the beach that looked good. The food was OK. There was more diversity in the age groups out this morning than there had been last night. The restaurant is part of a resort and there were some women tanning topless at the nearby pool. We wonder what the local Muslims think of that. Ron had told us that the pool was full of ocean fish last time he was there and that the water had risen to almost the very tip of the high peaked building next to the pool during the flood. It is hard to imagine.

The plan was head over to the neighboring island, Phi Phi Li in a few hours. Phi Phi Li is where they filmed “The Beach” with Leonardo Di Caprio. If you haven’t seen the movie, it is terrible, but the scenery is nice. It is uninhabited, and boat loads of tourists take day trips over there. We were waiting to go until late in the day for all the day trippers to come back so we could have the island to ourselves.

We wandered down some different streets within the village on our way back to Kosmos. It was more of the same as what we had seen yesterday. After coming from such remote places where we were one of the few tourists around, it was actually overwhelming to be a nameless, faceless person in a crowd of tourists. Even in Bali, which is a huge tourism center, the locals always struck up conversations with us and told us how happy they were that we came to their island. Even in places where they couldn’t speak a word of English, the locals usually managed to communicate that they were pleased we were there. Up until now we have always felt special, and here we are just part of the herd.

Nature has been uncooperative lately. It hasn’t rained since we left Langkawi, and after two passages, Kosmos needed the salt washed off. We gave her a quick wash down and she is looking good!

At 1600 (4:00 pm) we untied from the mooring and took the 45 minute ride to Maya Bay on Phi Phi Li Island. Like the last few islands, it is mostly tall rock jutting straight out of the water with a small area of really nice beach where you can go to shore. We had seen several boats coming back from Phi Phi Li, but the small bay was still full of boats and people when we pulled in. We would guess literally over a hundred people. We picked up a mooring and got the dinghy down. At Phi Phi Don, we knew that we had taken someone’s mooring and were worried about it being a problem, despite the man saying it would be OK. Here, we knew for sure that all the moorings were available for use, so we felt better about being here. As we loaded into the dinghy, the last of the boats gathered together their flock and sped off. Ahhh, peace and quiet.

Maya bay is stunning. It has two tiny pockets of sand tucked between cliffs on the west side, and a nice, good sized stretch of sand on thenortheast side. The rest is majestic cliffs similar to what we had seen inside the Emerald Hawng. We puttered around the bay a little, then landed the dinghy on the main stretch of beach.

There is a little footpath in the sand that takes you through a narrow valley between the cliffs to the other side of the island. The island is dense with jungle and the foot path probably needs a lot of maintenance to keep it from being overgrown.

We passed a ranger station in the center of the island. At the other end, there is a pool of water and a rock wall, so normally you can’t see the ocean from this side of the island. It happened to be low tide and the pool of water was almost empty. Eric climbed up the rocks, and Christi climbed through a hole in one of the rocks. In both cases we were treated to pretty views of the oceans and some very small islands nearby.

Ron had said that it was no fun to come here when there were too many tourists, and we could see why. The walkable part of the island is very small, and with literally hundreds of people walking around, there wouldn’t be any room to move. Thank goodness we came late! We walked back to the beach and happened upon some tents tucked in the far northwest corner of the beach. The 20 or so campers did not look too happy that we were walking through their campsite and none greeted us. We turned and headed to the other end of the beach. Being that it was low tide, we were able to walk beyond the stretch of beach we were on to the closer pocket of sand. This little pocket almost feels like the Hawng. It is surrounded on three sides by cliffs, with the nice sand and jungle all around and up the cliffs. There is a little dilapidated bamboo hut in the center. The cliffs look almost climbable, and if it were early in the day and we were wearing the right shoes, we may have even tried to climb a little ways up. However, the sun had already set and it was rapidly getting dark, and we needed to go. We quickly made our way back to the dinghy and headed back to Kosmos for the night.