Since you mentioned Asia, consider Kerala, the southern most state in India. India is like Europe - even though there are lots of similarities, most states have its own language, a different culture etc. Kerala is known for it's high literacy and higher standard of living. Plus its beautiful and raw too.
Kerala is great for tourism and spending a vacation, but I don't recall seeing a startup community thriving there - infact I did not see any known tech company there. Also the people there are English speaking, but not always. As far as tech intellectuals, I'm not sure how many there are in Kerala.
>high literacy
where literacy is defined as the ability to write my own name.
One would find a better-developed tech scene in Delhi/NCR and Bengaluru, but those aren't very nice places to live for different reasons. Kerala works only if the OP becomes a digital nomad and works remote.
Then there's also the problem of people going on strike whenever they like - flavour of the month types. When I went on a solo trip, they decided to strike due to the rise in fuel prices. Causes a lot of disruption in day-to-day activities. I'm guessing this is because of the influence of the communist party.
I lived in Bangkok the past 6 months and made many "intellectual" friends since moving here.
Two things I do, occasionally stay in hostels to meet people (hit and miss) and going to tech-related meetup.com and eventbrite.com events in Bangkok and Chiang Mai (80-90%+ of my friends in Thailand were met this way)
Bangkok or KL for Asia.
Austin for the US.