>> This is the same bleding-heart environmentalist bastard who allowed 20th
>> Century Fox to film The Beach in Maya Bay, where they destroyed beyond
>> repair one of the most beautiful natural parks in South East Asia. It seems
>> Leonardo wanted palm trees, which unfortunately don't grow in Maya Bay, so
>> they brought in bulldozers, stripped hundreds of years worth of topsoil,
>> planted coconut trees on the beach, then wrecked it again when they removed
>> the trees and brought in foreign soil on barges to "replace" what they
>> destroyed.

Reading this passage - I don't recall who wrote it) for the fourth or
fifth time - I have to step in.  Yes, Maya  Bay was pretty, and for all
I know it still is.  People reading this and other exchanges on the
subject can be excused for thinking that the filming of the Beach
represented an unprecedented intrusion into a previously unspoiled
natural area.

Anyone who visited Phi Phi Island before 20th Century Fox made their
movie there knows that it had already been raped long ago.  Packed to
the gills with drunken backpackers, the ugly crowded stretch of bars,
restaurants, brothels and cheap hotels which disfigured the center of
this tiny island had already spilled over into Maya Bay when I was last
there in the early 1990s.    I could see that Maya Bay had once been a
stunningly beautiful site, but "unspoilt" would have been the last word
I would have chosen to describe Phi Phi.   It was not a place I ever
wanted to see again.

Nothing much different from what happened on different scales in
Pattaya, Phuket, or Koh Samui, of cousrse, except that some of the
development which has largely ruined Phuket was aimed at a higher-class
market of tourists.

This is not to excuse the excesses that may have taken place in making
the film, but the crimes - if that it is what they were - had already
been committed years before.  Singling out 20th Century Fox for
"destroying" Maya Bay seems a bit over the top.  If anything, it was a
good thing that the movie people were steered to a place which had
already been severely damaged by mindless development, rather than
allowing them to use one of the few genuinely pristine islands left.

Robert Delfs



Robert Delfs
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