I've cycled Vietnam, Thailand, India and China and generally not locked the bike (or for that matter 8 months of touring through Australia either). I have brought bike and gear into a hotel room where I could and also carried the most critical things on my person. I was probably a bit too relaxed about it - and got a bit more concerned when I had an unlocked bike stolen in my home town in the USA when I just went into a grocery store to get Halloween candy. Since then I've been more conscious about locking bikes.

The only theft issue I had was in India in 2002. I didn't have a problem taking my bike into the least expensive lodgings (e.g. $2/night) or the fairly expensive ones (e.g. $40/night) but when I got into the mid-range of $10-15, it was typically a place that had their own security and a sense that bicycles belonged on the street and not in their rooms. So, it was more difficult to haggle enough to get the bike in the room. The place I stayed in Mysore was one such place. They assured me things would be safe in their locked garage under the hotel. So, I locked the bike to a pole underneath in the garage of the hotel. What I forgot to recognize was that I should have taken off the bicycle bell. When I left two days later, I was perhaps a mile or two later and realized that someone had taken my bell off my bike.

Russia isn't third world, but my cycling partner had some adolescents take a bike pump from her parked bike in a smal village in Siberia in 2007. She chased them but wasn't able to catch them. She was relieved when she discovered that I had two pumps with me along with a small mini-pump. She would have laughed at me before for bringing along three pumps, but my experience with the bike bell stolen in India five years before had made me cautious enough to double up on a small vital piece of equipment like a bike pump to make sure I could recover from it being stolen.

In general, I'm still at least as relaxed about theft in the fairly poor regions as I would be in the developed world. In some of the out of the way places, I had been more of a curiosity and while might be perceived to have money, that perception is probably less than if I were in an automobile... since sometimes thinking is if I had money to travel by auto, why wouldn't I be in one?