A few months ago, a reporter asked Alex Garland whether the film of his novel would have any effect on Maya Beach, and whether he worried about that. "I really don't see Leo fans jumping on planes and coming to Thailand," Garland answered. "I hope not."

A few weeks ago I called Garland up and told him that Leo fans were indeed jumping on planes and coming to Thailand. There was a significant pause. "If that's true, then there's a part of me that feels I fucked up," he said. "I find that slightly dismaying. I don't know how to feel about it."

A few days ago I dug out the snapshots from my weeks in Thailand. There was me in Bangkok, in a chrome-heavy tuk-tuk swamped to the floorboards by floodwater; me near Chiang Rai, hiking along a high bare ridgeline with Myanmar below; me in Phuket, leaning into the wind at Laem Phromthep point, the Buddhist monks in their pumpkin robes coloring the foreground. There was me on Maya Beach, just another tourist lingering too long without invitation, one of the first of many. There was me on the Chao Phraya River, and me in Krabi Town, and finally me in a tiny velvet-lined taxicab, the background blurry with motion, on my way to the airport, on my way home.

Here, here I am on a different island in Thailand, one of those limestone uplift isles that look like giant furry thumbs pushing out of the ocean. It's in the Phangnga Marine Park, about 40 miles north of where they filmed The Beach. You can actually get to it from there, do them both in the same day if you find a speedboat fast enough and if the sea stays nice and calm. Anyway, do you recognize it? About 25 years ago they came and filmed The Man with the Golden Gun here—you know, the one with Roger Moore and Christopher Lee as that guy Scaramanga and the midget Hervé Villechaize as his assistant. This was Scaramanga's hideaway, where James Bond finally tracks him down and saves the world again. There's that great scene where Bond lands his seaplane on the tiny beach and when he gets out the midget is there with a silver tray and a martini and says, "Welcome, Mr. Bond." Well, that's me on that beach. It was a hard picture to get because the beach was packed with tourists, and there were boats everywhere and dozens and dozens of souvenir shacks selling T-shirts and other guys selling Singha beer and everyone seemed to have a radio on too loud and after a few minutes you start feeling nervous and uncomfortable and begin looking for the boat to get you the hell out of there. Which is too bad, because it's a gorgeous island. It's called James Bond Island, and it's funny because that's even the name they have on a lot of the maps. Before the movie came out it was called Ko Pingan, but my boat driver said that if you told someone nowadays that you wanted to visit Ko Pingan, they wouldn't know where to take you. I guess no one uses that name anymore.

John Tayman is a former deputy editor of Outside.