The rooster and the call to prayer compete to wake me up. It is pitch-black outside; it is only 5.30am. When I open my eyes again it is 8am and I emerge in the kitchen - a covered open-air space at the back of the house - where the mother of the family is frying fish. The family only occasionally eats chicken and beef, so usually it is local fish and vegetables on the table. Their daughter, a recently-graduated art teacher, signed up with the state to be a teacher in exchange for a scholarship during her studies. She is very gifted and a painting of a boat catches my eyes, so I buy it. I am not her first client, as art collectors from Malaysia were invited to attend the graduates' exhibition and also liked her work.

Today we see a rubber plantation, a palm tree plantation, a jasmine flower plantation, an animal farm and a gold mine. We conclude that this village is wealthy - you can somehow feel it - people readily explain how nowadays they hire mostly immigrants, to wake up at 4am and gather the rubber, otherwise the sap hardens and one cannot reap it anymore. On the palm oil plantation one of five foreigners hired on the plantation demonstrates how branches are cleaned and how the harvesting is undertaken. He is from Java, where his wife and children still live. He plans to stay for a few years, as he gets a good payment, 30 ringgit (6 euros) per collected tonne. Palm oil plantation is relatively easy work, since the trees give fruit for about 20 years and do not require great care. In some places there are inter-crops among the palm trees but not here. Palm trees bring the most revenue but, wisely, villagers also tend to rubber, animals, fishing, renting out second homes and other services, then share revenue from visitors.

Is there social inequity? Yes, as it turns out from various discussions and newspapers articles where non-Malays feel that Malays get more advantages on the grounds of being the majority; they received land and facilities in the '60s, as they were very poor and living mostly in villages. On the other hand, Chinese are mostly in business in towns and, therefore, used to be wealthier. Indians are mostly in services. The owner of the small open-air gold mine is Chinese and he has a concession for the land from the state that takes care of the whole exploitation process. As he explains, "All the processing is done mechanically, so there's not much harm to the environment." His mine is jointly searching for tin and gold, with a more profitable result for tin. For the moment only, he hopes.

We leave him with his crew watching their pots on the fire cooking lunch and, after bidding farewell to our host families and exchanging small gifts, we leave for Melaka, the former capital of Malaysia and also a UNESCO Heritage site since 2008. The historical city centre is also dubbed the "Venice of the East" because of its lovely canal cruises that provide you with an insight into its Portuguese, Dutch and English colonial past that now blends with local communities.