According to a well-travelled friend, Songkhla is an attractive city filled with Sino-European architecture, set between the South China Sea and a coastal lagoon. So it comes as a surprise to discover few of Thailand’s 35 million international arrivals make it this far south, except to visit the paradisal island of Koh Lipe, on the opposite coast. Most guidebooks skim Songkhla, or omit it completely. Given its apparent charms along with its array of cultures (Thai, Malay, Chinese), this feels like something of an oversight.

Having decided to investigate my friend’s claims, I find myself wandering down the narrow lanes of Songkhla’s old town, peering inside Hokkien-style shophouses, their dimly lit interiors crowded with portraits of Thai monarchs, glancing up at artful stucco and passing mildewed mid-century buildings – the construction date, in Thai, high across the frontage.

My cultural compass is going haywire: glimpses of Penang, with its historic buildings and street art; hints of Hong Kong’s easy-going outlying islands; and Macau, too – not the gaudy casinos, but its working waterfront. Here, a weatherboard teakwood home; there, a Chinese shrine shaded by a weeping willow. It’s pleasantly disorienting. Why do so few visitors from afar come here?

A quick search on Google offers an answer: “Insurgents killed in Songkhla province”; “Troops injured in gunfight”; “Buddhist monk shot dead”. These headlines, all from last year, reflect the city’s proximity to Thailand’s “red zones” – places where most Western governments advise against all but “essential travel”.

Since the early 2000s, a separatist insurgency has bedevilled Thailand’s southern border, claiming more than 7,000 lives. Grievances stretch as far back as the 18th century, when the Kingdom of Siam took control of the Malay sultanate of Patani. Although Songkhla was never part of the Patani sultanate, and the city is located just above the red zone, it’s close enough to be tarred with the same separatist brush, even though the last instance of violence here that I can find mention of occurred seven years ago (a small bomb went off beside the city’s famous mermaid statue on Samila Beach, with no reported injuries).

Nevertheless, on this weekend, the old town is far from quiet; one can hardly move without straying into someone’s selfie, as Thai and Malaysian tourists pose in front of the city’s many murals, some depicting scenes of people at food carts from bygone times, others of men hauling fish.