Facing south west with stunning views of Phi Phi Leh lies ever popular Long Beach. This beach has possibly the softest finest white sand, on an island of fine soft sand, there’s also excellent snorkeling. Long Beach is both far enough from and close enough to the business of Tonsai Village to be a great place to stay.
Long Beach Phi Phi Photo Gallery
On 14 October 1881 the barque Snowdonia smashed into the western corner of Brownsman, reputedly hitting it so hard that she left a groove in the rock face, and all her eleven crew members died in the incident. She was a sailing ship of 419 tons, measuring 42.8 m in length with a 8.95-m beam and a 5.3-m draught and was bound from the Coosaw River in South Carolina to Berwick with a cargo of phosphate rock. The Snowdonia was a wooden vessel with the hull protected by a sheath of copper. The most dubious story of a ship wrecked on the Farne Islands has to be that of the old Norwegian sailing vessel Spika. I personally have never seen any records of a ship called Spika coming ashore on Brownsman, but there may have been some confusion with the Russian wooden schooner Spica of Riga (now in Latvia) which was wrecked on the North Wamses in January 1916. She had been on passage from Kristiania, Norway for West Hartlepool with a cargo of pit props; the crew was taken off by lifeboat. Even today, some parts of this ship still lie on top of the island, but most of her valuable oak timbers were gradually salvaged many years ago by people from Seahouses.
