I wanted to buy a trinket, a mother-of-pearl necklace, from a stall in Koh Phi Phi just a few weeks ago. I tried to get the stall owner's attention but he was engrossed by the football match on the television. A shot ballooned over the bar; the stallholder turned to me and grinned: 'Liverpool, they're rubbish.'

This Phi Phi was not the hippies' beach, the travellers' beach, Leonardo di Caprio's The Beach. But you wouldn't have known that from just a few miles away. We approached it on a blue sea, out of a blue sky. It was a breathtaking sight: two horseshoe-shaped bays joined by an isthmus. We passed its limestone cliffs, their faces gouged like Chinese ivory, and anchored in the southern bay. But then I stepped ashore.

What a difference a decade and a Hollywood film makes: the shorefront of the fishing village was now a strip of massage outfits and bars. Just when we thought we'd found the end of town, we'd turn a corner to find the pillars of new buildings marching down a muddy street.

Something was driving this frenzied development, and on the streets and in the bars was the evidence: apart from the occasional hippy, the crowd was mainly couples in their twenties and thirties, a few steering pushchairs. Britons, emboldened by Easyjet and co, were striking out independently across the world. A stay on Phi Phi would just be a couple of nights of a holiday that would probably also take in Phuket and Bangkok. And Phi Phi was happy to have them, despite the effect on its little piece of paradise (guidebooks talked of a mountain of rubbish and polluted wells).

We snorkelled in the bay the next day, watching for powerboats bringing in day trippers, and finding carrier bags among the angel fish. Phi Phi had changed. A huge variety of people had been drawn to it by The Beach, trying to find their island idyll. On Boxing Day, that idyll disappeared.