I don’t consider it an exaggeration to call Koh Phi Phi the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited. Brutal limestone cliffs covered by a luscious green blanket erupt 200 feet out of the turquoise sea to scratch at the vast blue sky. These cliffs guard stretches of gleaming silver sand where stunningly clear water slowly licks back and forth throughout the day. In the shallows, you can count grains of white sand through the crystal liquid; further out the surface protects a rainbow world – reefs living and eating and dying in a Technicolor whorl of motion. 
 
Some philosophers consider beauty as an aesthetic term. It can be taken to be considered as a matter of form. If a form is complete and whole – if an observer feels the essence of the thing in itself follows an expected pattern, contour, shape – it can bring a soothing mental effect. We don’t have to imagine any of the missing pieces, because there they are, right in front of us. Obviously, this means that there are a lot of beautiful things. Art is often beautiful, a mother and newborn can be beautiful and much of the earth is very beautiful. But of course there are shades to everything. Our lives are not split into two categories: the beautiful and the everything else. And so, in terms of degrees of beauty, the island of Koh Phi Phi takes the cake from this observer’s standpoint. It is beyond soothing to visually take in the landscape. It couldn’t be more complete.
 
But thinking about it this way, I wonder: Is the only reason I think this place is so beautiful because it supplies so many criteria I have been taught to think of as “beautiful”? There was one embarrassing moment in the beginning where I caught myself thinking, “This is almost like in the postcards.” My inner disaffected youthful criticism could still point out the flaws. And I can only assume that most other people could go through a similar mental exercise. Because here’s the thing: most other parts of Koh Phi Phi can be pretty gross.
Thailand is the most visited destination in Asia, and while the country’s Tourism Authority does not supply exact figures, it is widely acknowledged that Koh Phi Phi is one of the most heavily trafficked destinations. And that once the island’s iconic Maya Bay was cast in the title role of the 2000 Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach, what was once a sparse and rugged island has been radically transformed into a highly charged commercial engine, throwing a manic energy atop a soporifically enchanting landscape.
90% of menus have pizza on them; hillsides once covered by untamed jungle are being stripped, the I-beams of a soon-to-open hotel stand naked and sheer. In the town center, mother and child teams build and sell “buckets” to young shirtless men along a neon parade route of beachside bars. (A bucket is an electrifying combination of liquor, soda and Thai Red Bull – itself banned in several countries – stirred together with ice and served in a small plastic bucket. About six shots, and some speed to go with it, ready to drink through one of seven straws. It is the most popular drink in Southern Thailand.)
And none of this is necessarily a bad thing. The residents of Koh Phi Phi are certainly better off financially now that a flourishing tourist industry has found a home there. But it makes it weird to visit. There is a rather extreme dissonance found within the experience.
All around, you are surrounded by one of the most visually stunning places in the world, while the smells, sounds and claustrophobic mangle of the small society you are now part of are enough to keep you locked in a hotel room for the night. It may just be a richer experience.
All my new friends aren’t in themselves the problem. Like every problem, its true source is a personal one. The issue is that going out and partying with an enormous group of young westerners is undeniably fun.  After months of near total sobriety, I was suddenly surrounded by a gyrating, strobe-lit amoeba, filled from the inside out by some unstoppable desire to act like a complete moron. I blame the buckets. 
So here we have, on one hand the foggy memories of belligerence from last night (and the night before, and the night before that), and on the other, a snorkeling trip through a silent world of blue clarity followed by lunch on an wide arc of spotless white sand. Ping-ponging between the serene and the obscene. It takes an emotional – and, eventually, physical – toll. It is, quite frankly, absurd.
 
I seek solace in the water. After months of traveling I am finally surrounded by ocean, day in, day out.  When the powers of the tropics get to be too much – the heat, the blinding sun, the sweat, the crowds – then it’s time to find the water. To maybe strap on a mask and paddle through the shallows, to follow the solar rays filtered through the lolling surface. It really is crystalline. It’s shallow enough that there’s no room to tread, I have to swim horizontally, staring directly down at this beautiful fluid flux of light. Streams like liquid electricity dance through the water, refracted through the unhurried turbulence of the surface.  The phenomenon of it all is doubled, because the wave movement that births this show is also moving me, and so my motion and sight are linked. I feel the liquid sun. Nothing else.

Or when the beach is crowded, to walk into the lazy water and lie, face up, in the ankle-deep shallows on a silver bed of sand. I lower my head under the empty, clear liquid. The melee of European language is put on hold and the still, heavy stasis of the ocean fills my head with silence from the inside out. The rectangle of cliffs and sky above my head is an empty world.
Absurdity is the new beauty.