"The waves in Maya Bay are always awesome because it's an inlet, but I've never seen this degree of erosion," she said. "What they have done is like weakening someone's immune system, so that something that can usually be coped with becomes life-threatening."For their part, Sarah Clark, the spokeswoman for the production team, says the film-makers are monitoring the beach carefully, sending regular scouts to report back, and flying Mr Palmer out from England when required. The beach will look quite different in February."Protester Ing Kanjanavanit is not impressed by this argument, however. Ross Palmer, a horticulturist for 20th Century Fox, visited the island on Tuesday and said he was not at all worried by what he saw. "During stormy periods, nothing will stop the sea from taking what it wants, not even plants.

It is perfectly normal for the sand to erode during the monsoon, it just sits in the bay and gets pushed up again at the end of the season. Finally, cast and crew went home, but not before even the elements turned against them: in April, they were forced to jump from a sinking boat in stormy seas, abandoning their equipment. It must have seemed like the last straw.Then to cap it all, two weeks ago another huge storm hit Thailand - the biggest in 30 years - causing severe flooding. Protesters jostled with them in yet more boats, displaying banners urging Leo not to "break our laws and our hearts".DiCaprio was photographed doing the Thai wai, a traditional bow of respect, and the film was blessed by Buddhist monks, but still the situation did not improve.

Rumours spread: Leonardo had police protection and was so alarmed by the protests that he'd hired a food taster. Macdonald was rumoured to have employed gunmen to protect the set - something he emphatically denied.The filming went ahead, however, with 40 fewer coconut trees than originally planned; and afterwards, the producers set about restoring the beach, replanting the native plants (which had been kept in a nursery) and reconstructing sand-dunes supported by bamboo sticks and protected by a fence. Protesters began camping on the beach, erecting signs demanding that the film-makers "stop raping Maya Bay" - but to no avail. A month later, the RFD endorsed the film once more.When DiCaprio finally arrived in January, he had more than the usual crowd of hysterical teenage fans to deal with. The press bobbed about in boats outside his hotel in Phuket and followed him to Maya Bay in the hope of capturing the small paunch he was rumoured to have acquired.

When the bulldozer moved onto the beach, protests grew so vociferous that preparations for the film were halted after just two days while a Royal Forestry Department (RFD) committee assessed the environmental impact. Instead, they say they wanted to protect one of Thailand's few remaining untouched beaches and were not going to pass up the chance of using one of Hollywood's biggest names to highlight what they saw as a betrayal by their government. We are spending a lot of money and employing a lot of expertise to make sure it's done with the utmost care and sympathy."But to the protesters, Phi Phi Don and the like are already lost causes. In their eyes, they were simply going to rearrange a beach temporarily and then put it back as it had been, minus the three tons of rubbish they said they had removed. Macdonald sounded hurt and dumbfounded when he wrote in The Nation: "We never expected to be faced with the criticism that we have received over the last few weeks."The fuss over Maya Bay seemed absurd when there were other more serious environmental travesties to worry about.