Malaysia travel blog: mall hopping in KL
If there’s one thing that defines Kuala Lumpur, it’s the shopping experience. There are so many malls it can be seriously overwhelming if you’ve never been there before, and they range from super expensive designer oriented joints down to bargain basement stalls rammed with teenagers peddling their home made clothes at next to nothing prices.
Our modestly priced but extremely well maintained hotel, the Parkroyal, was located in Bukit Bintang which is in the ‘golden triangle’ area of KL. This area encapsulates the city’s most famous landmark, the Petronas Towers (next post will be on these beasts), as well as a huge number of malls, restaurants and entertainment outlets. The hotel is opposite Sungei Wang Plaza, which is known for cheap trendy fashion but also contains everything else under the sun, including photographic gear and an entire floor dedicated to computers and mobile phones. The scale of the place is ridiculous; I’ve been to KL 4 times before and to this mall every time, but I continue to get lost in the maze of thin corridors lined with shops which seem to be organised in a totally random manner. There are hairdressers next to chemists next to gadget shops next to tattoo parlours.
Behind Sungei Wang you can find Low Yat Plaza, which is the place to go if you’re after computer gear, electronics of any kind or photography equipment. I was so excited when I was in there that I neglected to take any photos. Oops.
Photo tip
Photography wise, I have been trying to keep it light on this holiday because a) I want to enjoy it, and b) it’s so hot here that walking makes me break a sweat. So carrying around loads of lenses and flashes is not really an option. For that reason, I have a bunch of fast aperture lenses that I use to capture the most of the ambient light.
I’ve been shooting primarily in aperture priority, mostly wide open at f1.4 – f2 (depending on the lens). I also tend to keep auto ISO on with my Nikon D7000, which I find works pretty well with an upper limit of 6400 and a minimum shutter speed depending on the lens being used. If you’re wondering what I mean by this, it’s commonly accepted that in order to avoid ‘camera shake’ (as opposed to blur caused by subject movement) in your photos, you need to be shooting at 1/(your focal length in 35mm equivalent). That means if I am using an 85mm lens on a full frame camera like the D700 or 5D Mk II, I would need to be at 1/80 or 1/100 as a minimum. Since I have been using a cropped sensor camera here, the 1.5x multiplier needs to be taken into account when considering your focal length. Therefore, an 85mm lens on a cropped camera like my D7000 is approx 125mm, so 1/125 or 1/160 is a good shutter speed to be at.
Now enough of the boring stuff (says the wife), let’s get back to the trip.
To the western end of Bukit Bintang is the famous Central Market. This place has been around since 1888 and is a large covered and air conditioned market hall which houses some of Malaysia’s finest arts & crafts, as well as a fantastic food court. The market is divided into various themed streets, including Indian, Malaysian and Chinese which reflects the multicultural society in the country. You can get pretty much anything here (including a lovely fake Rolex – no I didn’t get one), and the prices are not bad. Haggling is okay too.
Next stop on the mall tour was the Mid Valley Megamall. This place is out of the center of town, in the area known as Mid Valley and Bangsar. The Megamall is huge, something like 430 shops over 5 floors, with everything you can think of available, as well as an enormous food court on the upper floor which has all sorts of stuff at bargain prices (a meal is around RM 6.50 which is £1.30 right now!)
There’s also another annexed mall called The Gardens which is connected to Megamall via a pedestrian footbridge. The Gardens is where all the big names are located – Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc. We didn’t spend much time there, because I’d rather spend all my money on lenses!
Surprisingly enough, there were some real gardens near the entrance to The Gardens Mall, so with my trusty 85mm lens I decided it would be a nice time for a portrait:
Photo tip break!
The sun was beating down hard which meant hard shadows on the face and lots of squinting. The solution is to find a bit of shade to place your subject in. The best I could do in order to retain the garden backdrop was to use the overhead awning which provides some shade on her face. This stopped her from squinting and getting bags under the eyes. The light coloured floor bounced a lot of the light back up and filled in any dark shadows that may have formed below.
Of course, having now exposed her as best I could, a new problem arose: there were dark areas and light areas in the same image, and if the exposure was off then either the dark areas would be too dark or the light areas would be too light. The quick solution was to ride the exposure compensation dial to get the best balance between the two. The real solution, had this been a commercial shoot, would have been to expose the background correctly then light her with strobes or flashes. No chance of anything like that happening on holiday so, I found a happy medium, then bumped the fill light slider in Lightroom to add a little more detail to the subject.
Now, let’s get back to the malls. Back in KL in the Bukit Bintang area we also visited Pavilion, a newly opened behemoth which houses international stores and also smaller boutiques and local shops. There’s a nice fountain outside, which also makes for a nice portrait backdrop:
Very near to Pavilion is the old KL Plaza, now renovated and renamed to Fahrenheit 88. We didn’t spend much time in there, but it looked fairly nice. Next to F88 is another, smaller, older mall called Lot 10. Lot 10 is pretty unimpressive inside, but houses an awesome basement food court which consists primarily of Chinese hawker stalls who were asked to relocate into the mall. Stay tuned for the food court post for more info on that, though. If you stand at the entrance of Lot 10 looking out, you can see the main junction of Bukit Bintang (think Piccadilly Circus in London):
A five minute walk away from Lot 10 is another absolutely ridiculously huge mall, called Berjaya Times Square. By this point we had gotten a little bored of actually shopping in these places, but checked them out for the sheer spectacle. The 7 storey high Berjaya houses an entire theme park, including a rollercoaster!!! This place is truly huge, if you’ve been to the malls in Dubai it’s on that scale (but the goods are so much cheaper here).
Last but nowhere near least on this little tour of KL’s shopping malls is the formidable Suria KLCC, situated underneath the Petronas Twin Towers, a 10 minute taxi ride away from Bukit Bintang. Suria is another gigantic place, with all the usual suspect shops but a few smaller independent places and an impressive array of eateries that make it worth a trip.
Here’s one more of my favourites, photographically awful but what the hell – I’m on holiday:
In summary:
- In my opinion, these are the best malls in KL, and KL is a great place to go for shopping, whether you’re after clothes, electronics or pretty much anything else.
- For fashion and for the younger crowd, Sungei Wang can’t be beat for price or variety.
- For electronics and camera gear, you should head over to Low Yat Plaza. The prices are pretty good, and for a rough guide (for my UK readers), I would say the prices are what you’d pay at home minus VAT.
- Pavilion is a great place for general shopping and eating, as is the Megamall and Berjaya Times Square.
- I haven’t got much to say about Fahrenheit 88 or Lot 10 because the others were more than sufficient to cover the sort of shopping we wanted to do.
- In comparison to other shopping destinations people head to on holiday, KL is by far the most impressive and cheapest. We didn’t have much luck in Dubai when we went there a couple of years ago, and despite the huge number of malls there, the prices were still relatively high.
Next stop: the Petronas Twin Towers!
