It is my firm belief that any self respecting world traveller should be compelled by law to visit Phang Nga Bay at least once before they die, even if this requires a friend to pull them from their death bed and drag them to the airport by their teeth. Even if you don't know the place by name, you would recognise Phang Nga immediately if you saw it - these days, it seems as though you can't look anywhere without being overwhelmed by photographs of imposing limestone islands rising from the Andaman Sea, whether it's on the pages of a glossy magazine or part of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. There are very few places on Earth where nature slaps you in the face on arrival and goes "yeah, didn't expect that, did you?", and this is most assuredly one of them - but unfortunately, just like Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano which recently grounded planes across Europe by having the cheek to erupt at the start of the holiday season, nobody outside of the local tourist board has any idea how to pronounce the place, so if you want to come here, it's probably best just to take your travel agent over to the brochure section and grunt excitedly while pointing.

If you've ever been to the Grand Canyon, you'll know the feeling of being totally unable to describe the scale of a place. As soon as you arrive in the vicinity of Phang Nga Bay, and even before you've boarded your boat, most of the adjectives you have on standby simply fall out of your head - beautiful, magnificent, and even pulchritudinous if you've taken the precaution of bringing a thesaurus with you, are no longer adequate. It is perfectly acceptable - almost compulsory, in fact - to stand on the roof of the boat as it chugs around the bay, jaw hanging down to your knees as though auditioning for the part of the creature in Aliens, stammering incomprehensibly as you search for words. There are no shortage of things to do in Phang Nga Bay, although none of them require much more effort than getting out of bed. Whether your idea of a great day involves lazing around on the back of a boat soaking up the sun, kayaking around the islands of the Andaman Sea exploring the countless hidden cave systems, or stuffing your face with food you probably wouldn't want to identify even if you could on the strangely alluring Sea Gypsy Island, Phang Nga has something to tempt everyone. The bay covers a massive one hundred and fifty square miles of ocean, an area twice the size of Liechtenstein, around which sheer limestone stacks rise at regular intervals up to 350 meters into the air as though hammered up through the ocean floor from below like giant nails. The blacks and greys of the rock are punctuated with streaks of red from iron deposits, and covered with the greens of trees, making them not only beautiful and otherworldly but also an oasis of colour within the clear waters of the bay. On a clear day, which is to say pretty much all of the time, the shimmering reflections of these prehistoric megaliths in the crystal clear water create the illusion from a distance of flying islands in the sky. There are more than 40 such stacks, the result of the accumulated skeletal remains of ancient marine creatures being crushed under their own weight to form a limestone crust before immense geological forces fractured the seabed and pushed them skyward. Over millions of years, rising and falling sea levels has worn away the soft limestone to form fascinating islands of dense forest at angles far too steep for any human to climb. Of course, this process is still ongoing - what we see today are, in geological terms, merely the last stages of a process which is almost complete. Come back in a million years or so, assuming mankind hasn't wiped itself from the face of the universe by then, and you'll find erosion has done its job and that Phang Nga Bay is nothing more than a flat ocean. See it while you can.

Many of the limestone stacks are pitted with caves, known as Hongs, the tides carving out great chambers which lay waiting to be explored. Some of these Hongs, reachable only by kayak, contain ancient cave paintings which only the most adventurous will ever see. Others have only recently been discovered by those with a death wish who enjoy nothing more than the thrill of hammering a small piece of metal into a flakey cliff face and climbing to ridiculous heights in the hope that nothing snaps. Many of the Hongs have no entrance from the sea, and unless you want to take your life into your hands or hire a helicopter and a Hollywood stunt man to fly it, a lot of them will remain undiscovered for many years to come.

If you're the type who likes to play Robinson Crusoe, you'll be pleased to hear that several of the islands have small beaches at their base or running between them, and there are plenty of places to anchor a boat and head off to explore. Even better, most of the beaches are too small for the big tourist launches to reach, so if you can hire a private boat there is a very real possibility that you could end up with your own personal paradise for the day. Protected from both the Northeast and Southwest monsoons, the bay is never less than tranquil - you'll hardly ever find the waters choppy in Phang Nga - so if you're willing to hire a kayak and take off into the bay on your own, you could conceivably camp on a beach somewhere and make the islands your own for a couple of days. Of course, checking whether your favourite beach disappears beneath the waves at high tide would probably be a good idea first, as anybody who vanishes suddenly within 150 square miles of ocean is unlikely to be found anytime soon.

Our stop for lunch was at the wonderfully named Sea Gypsy Island, or Koh Panyee as it's known by those with the respect to call things by their proper name. Slap in the middle of the bay is an entire community of fishermen, living in a village built entirely on stilts and attached to the face of a giant limestone monolith by nothing more than spit and chewing gum. And they can't even get the chewing gum. At lunchtime, hundreds of tourists converge on the village to shop at its craft stalls, partake of the amazing variety of food laid out in its restaurant, and have their photographs taken with the resident pet - a sea eagle which obviously knows where its next meal is coming from and is happy to eat the tourists if they don't cough up the grub. I have no idea how this flimsy collection of planks and branches manages to support the weight of about a kajillion people stomping all over it at once, but it does - it would seem that even sea gypsy builders know more about building things to last than the cowboys who put my conservatory up. If a group of gypsies living on a permanent raft in the middle of the ocean can manage to sleep soundly at night in the knowledge that their floating collection of twigs isn't going to sink to the bottom of the sea when several hundred people stand on it at once, how come the local builders here in England can't even put up a roof that doesn't leak at the first sign of rain? I want answers.

The highlight of the bay for many people - and indeed the single biggest reason that people keep coming back - is the island of Koh Khao Phing Gan, or, as it is more commonly known, James Bond Island. It is here that Roger Moore was taken to Scaramanga's secret hideout in the 1974 Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun - back when Bond movies actually had plots and didn't involve simply blowing everything up for two hours while cramming in as many exotic locations as possible. The impossibly shaped Koh Tapu - Nail Island - sticking out of the bay nearby was the hiding place of the secret weapon with which Scaramanga intended to take over the world. The beach at James Bond Island is packed with salesmen selling the usual paraphernalia, and the place has become something of a tourist trap. For once, though, it is actually possible to ignore the fact that you are just one of several thousand people who seem to have all chosen exactly the same moment to arrive on the island, because as soon as you get one look at Koh Tapu you're just glad you got to see it. The best way to see the monolith, however, is not to gawk at it from the beach as many do but to follow a narrow pathway which winds around the side of the cliff face - this takes you to a lookout point in the trees from where you can get a much more impressive view and for one moment imagine that you're actually looking at Scaramanga's giant weapon. As the actress said to the bishop. Unfortunately, the lookout is positioned within a wooded area, which makes it nearly impossible to take a good photo of anyone standing with Koh Tapu in the background due to bad light in the foreground, so make sure you take a good camera or read up on HDR photography before you go if you expect to get a decent dynamic range. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have the budget to afford any such luxury - so I came away with a fairly decent collection of silhouettes of Eloise standing in front of the monolith and perfect shots of her standing in front of an unidentifiable nail shaped blob.

I would've been perfectly happy to sail around the Andaman sea all day exploring the islands, even if it had meant getting stuck in a cave and having to get off and camp overnight until rescued - and there aren't many places you can say that. Tour companies, however, have a tendency to try to cram as much as possible into the smallest amount of time they can get away with, which means that even a trip to beautiful Phang Nga Bay has to come to an end prematurely so that you can be whisked off to somewhere else. On the way back to Patong, we stopped off at Wat Tham Suwan Khuha - essentially a large temple in a cave. I don't know whether the Thai government had temporarily run out of money for building temples outside when the construction began, but the result is one of the most truly amazing experiences you could wish for in this part of the world. At the entrance, monkeys scamper around taking food from tourists - not necessarily with their consent - and Thai salesmen sell bags of nuts just in case anyone actually feels like hanging on to their packed lunch. Getting the coach into the car park involves running over about three hundred monkeys - I might have made that up - and once you get inside the complex you realise that there isn't a single inch of road not occupied by a macaque. One thing the monkeys really love is to bend car aerials into interesting shapes and claim windscreen wipers as their own, so if you drive here I seriously suggest you either encase your vehicle in cement before you go inside or leave a friend to guard it while you're gone, as it almost certainly won't look quite the same when you get back otherwise. Of course, encasing your car in cement may introduce other issues when it's time to drive off again, so I'd probably stick to the second option, although it might also be an idea to encase your friend in cement for his own protection because the monkeys really don't like being told what to do.

If you intend to actually go inside Wat Tham, and why wouldn't you, you have to cough up a paltry 10 baht entrance fee and make your way through a wholly ineffectual turnstile which looks as though it was put up as an afterthought and likely to fall apart at any moment - but as 10 Baht is about 20 pence, anybody seriously contemplating hopping over the turnstile without paying needs to take a long hard look at themselves. Dominating a huge chamber on the other side of the entrance is one of the largest reclining Buddha statues I have ever seen, as well as buddhist images adorning every surface - it doesn't take long to realise how they spent all the money they saved by not bothering with the outside. In the middle of the chamber, a Buddhist monk sits cross-legged within a roped off area offering to bless anyone who sprawls themselves at his feet - which is a surprising number of people. Each of these pilgrims then drops some coins into a box before leaving, which is certainly not something I've seen anywhere else. Somehow, I think I'd let people sprawl themselves at my feet as well if they were paying for the privilege.

At the back of the main chamber, a flight of steps leads up to the Light Cave. This is one of those places where an active imagination is required, as the guides will try to convince you - with a straight face - that the stalactites and stalagmites have shaped themselves over millions of years into elephants, tigers and any other exotic animals you might be able to see if you stand on your head and squint in just the right light. Beyond the Light Cave, a rough pathway leads further into the cave system until you arrive at a chamber called the Dark Cave. Clearly, whoever first discovered these caves used up all their imagination finding creatures in the walls, and by the time anybody thought to name the caves, they just couldn't be bothered any more. Mind you, when you step through the doorway - by which I mean a low gap in the rock - it becomes frighteningly obvious why the Dark Cave is so called. Not more than four or five steps after entering the chamber, you trip and fall head first over the body of a dead tourist and plummet into a bottomless pit. Or, at least, that's what I imagined would've happened if I hadn't taken two steps, felt entirely unsteady on my feet, and turned back. I might be adventurous, but I'm not stupid.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.