You hit the nail on the head. There’s a huge distinction between travelling to a region and living there. It may be the case that I’ll move to a model of living in different regions depending on which time of year it is — I haven’t decided yet.

I don’t get the “foreigner with a target on my back” problem in Thailand since, being Malaysian, I can quite easily pass off as Thai at first glance. But I’ve seen them going for non-Asian-looking tourists and I can imagine it gets old pretty quickly.