The young woman closes her eyelids.

The glaring light reflected by the flour-fine sand and the shallow water surface at midday is so strong that it hurts your eyes.

The Thai woman looks out over Maya Bay from the beach.

"It's so much nicer here," she says as the crystal-clear water laps her feet.

A little further from the beach, the sea glows in unearthly neon turquoise.

At the end of the bay rises a wall of dark gray karst rocks, the primeval giants have almost surrounded the place.

Only at the extreme end is there a gap that opens the bay to the ocean.

It was the entrance gate for an armada of speedboats and longtail boats that came here every day for years.

Till Fähnders

Political correspondent for Southeast Asia.

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The woman's name is Kanyarat Petna, she comes from the island of Phuket and is a tourist guide.

She has known this picturesque place for many years.

But she has never seen him like she has in the past few weeks.

Maya Bay in southern Thailand was closed to visitors for more than three years.

The nature destroyed by mass tourism should be able to recover.

The thirty-four-year-old still remembers how she enjoyed the open view of the bay for the first time after the reopening at the beginning of the year.

"I was so happy.

I laughed because everything was so much nicer.

Before we couldn't even see the beach – only boats.” Instead of thousands of tourists every day, there are now fish that come close to the shore.

And then a small shadow scurries past in the shallow water.

A tourist pulls out his mobile phone and follows the animal, which is about 30 centimeters long, with his lens.

The grey-brown body has small black spots on the fins: a blacktip reef shark.

The return of this largely harmless species of shark is seen as a sign of how Maya Bay, home to one of the world's most famous beaches in an almost perfect crescent, has recovered.

The place owes its popularity to the film “The Beach”.

In it, young Leonardo DiCaprio stuck his toes in the sand, rested his elbows on his knees, and gazed out at the sea with a rapturous smile.

“Like in a parking lot”

For the backpacker portrayed by the Hollywood star at the time, discovering an untouched paradise was the ultimate backpacker's dream come true.

He had found it using a kind of treasure map that another backpacker had left him.

In truth, the bay is fairly easy to access, by speedboat or longtail from Phuket or the neighboring island of Ko Phi Phi Don.

With a deafening rattle, the wooden boat glides over the surface of the water with the rear propeller projecting far to the rear.

The uninhabited island of Ko Phi Phi Leh, on which the bay is located, juts out of the water like the armored back of a primeval amphibian.

A majestic limestone cliff rises at the edge.

In the film, the dream trip had an ugly ending.

As so often in literature and film, betrayal, death and ruin lurked behind the dreamlike surface.

In real life, too, the beach soon lost some of its magic after the film's success.

“The low water reef at Maya Bay was wonderful.

I went diving there many years ago," says marine biologist Thon Thamrongnawasawat of Bangkok's Kasetsart University.

But the film changed that.

"After 'The Beach', more and more people came to the bay, including more and more tourist groups from China and Korea." Up to 8,000 visitors per day now came.

Sometimes there were 100 boats on the beach: "Like in a parking lot."