In ravaging Thailand's Ko Phi Phi Don, December's tsunami may have saved the island from ruin. Joe Cummings reports

I first traveled to Phi Phi Don in 1981 to research Lonely Planet's guidebook on Thailand. Ton Sai Beach, the impossibly beautiful crescent of sand on the south side of the island's skinny isthmus, was undeveloped except for a single set of simple thatch-roofed bungalows in which you could spend the night. It is the only place I can remember where that most common of beach bungalow names—Paradise—did not ring of hyperbole.

By the mid-1990s, both Ton Sai Beach and Lo Dalam Beach, its mirror image only a few hundred yards away on the north side of the isthmus, were so crammed with pizza parlors, dive shops, multistory concrete hotels, and souvenir stands that I was advising Lonely Planet readers to boycott the island. Toward the east end of Ton Sai Beach, near a huge pier built for the speed cruisers that carry tourists and supplies to and from the island, the shops were packed in so tightly that once you entered the grid of narrow lanes, you could see nothing of the sea, sand, or palms—only tile roofs, asphalt, and row upon row of commercial signage in English, Japanese, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew.

Since then, things had only gotten worse: Behind Ton Sai stood piles of rotting garbage. A hastily built reservoir near the center of the island—meant to supply tap water for the local residents—was badly maintained and quickly turned stagnant.

Just as alarming, beach accommodations, restaurants, and other businesses catering to tourists had expanded into areas of the island belonging to Mu Ko Phi Phi National Park. This 150-square-mile zone of protected land and sea extends from the coast of mainland Krabi Province, across vast Phang-nga Bay, and into the Phi Phi archipelago. Mu Ko Phi Phi's crown jewels are the parklands on Phi Phi Don, almost all of neighboring Phi Phi Leh, and the smaller islands of Bida Nok, Bida Nai, Yung, and Phai. Some local environmentalists believe that illegal development infringed on as much as 25 percent of the national parkland on Phi Phi Don.

In early January, 11 days after the tsunami hit the Andaman coast, I toured Phi Phi Don at the side of the Krabi provincial governor, Arnont Promnart, who was visiting the island to assess the damage and to determine how best to rebuild. Following the tsunami, the question on his and everyone else's mind is what shape the island should take this time around.