Shore Amora, Pererenan: the only address on this site that breaks my own rules

The thing you notice first on Jalan Pantai Pererenan is that nobody is using their horn.

That sounds like nothing until you've spent a week anywhere else in Canggu. This is a quiet street. The buildings along it are low and unshowy, some of them almost sweet, and there is no chaos and no wall of traffic. It may be the most relaxed road I've come across on this island.

Then towards the end of the day it fills up, and this is the part that made me fall for it. Young Balinese arrive on their scooters to sit out the sunset, because Pererenan is still theirs in a way that Berawa and Batu Bolong stopped being some time ago, where the crowd is now almost entirely Western. Two separate worlds, a few kilometres apart, and this is the one where the locals still come to hang around at the end of a working day.

That's why this page exists, and I should be straight with you about it. Everything else on this site is held to a standard I'm fairly proud of, and this hotel doesn't meet it. I earn almost nothing on it either, so commercially there's no reason to write about it at all. But I've fallen for this corner of Canggu, and if I'm going to tell you about the street then I have to tell you where to sleep on it, and this is the only real answer.

The street

The road runs two and a half kilometres from the beach up to a busy junction, winding between wide, vividly green rice fields that are still being worked by local farmers rather than merely photographed by visitors. The first time I came, four years ago, there was considerably more of that, plus grass paddocks with cows grazing on them. It's filling in now, as everything here does, but so far without the excesses I've watched ruin other parts of this island.

What's arrived in between is an unusually good run of small coffee places, boutiques and restaurants, Shelter among them, which may be my favourite table in this part of Bali. None of it carries the shouty quality of the bigger going-out districts. If your holiday revolves around eating and drinking, I'd argue this is the best walkable stretch on the island, and I'll stand behind that. It helps that the road was laid out more generously than most of Canggu, so it suffers far less from the macet that makes the rest of the area exhausting.

Shore Amora is the only real hotel on it

Technically there are others. Noema is closer to an aparthotel and Masmara is a villa compound. If you want an actual hotel here, with a front desk and a restaurant and somebody to sort things out, this is it.

The layout is simple: 20 villas and 12 suites arranged around a working rice field. A central hub holds the restaurant, the bar and lobby, a lounge and workspace, and a small pool. The hub is where the place lives, and because something is going on in it from morning until late, it's genuinely good fun to be there. Sometimes that's for one of their matcha lattes, which are excellent. Sometimes it's a plate of something and a cocktail while a couple of stylish young women drift about the pool on inflatable flamingos, which tells you roughly who else is staying.

The food and drink are held to a properly high standard, and I suspect they haven't much choice about it. The competition within walking distance is murderous.

The only hotel in Bali where the staff were students

This is the part I found most interesting, and I've stayed in a lot of hotels here.

Everywhere else on this island the staff are career hospitality people, often decades into it. Here they were part-timers, almost all of them young students fitting this around their degrees. By the standards I'm used to they weren't trained at all. They were also delightful: warm, funny, plainly enjoying themselves and happy to talk. I came away knowing a fair amount about university life in Indonesia, which turns out to be more familiar than I'd assumed. I enjoyed those conversations more than plenty of polished ones I've had at hotels charging ten times the rate.

The building has been put together the same way

There's a consistency to that, and I mean it descriptively rather than as a criticism. This is a hotel staffed by people who won't spend their lives in it, and it's been built in a way that doesn't expect to last very long either.

The villas look sharp and photograph beautifully, and I wouldn't call them luxurious. This is the standard Balinese spec villa going up all over the island now: crisp and clean on handover, made from cheap materials, and beginning to come apart within a few years. Each one has its own plunge pool, though ours ran so cold that I never managed more than a toe.

None of which stopped it being a nice place to be. We lived with the shortcomings easily enough, and at around $150 a night including breakfast you don't really have the right to complain. What I'd say for Shore Amora is that it feels like an honest operation genuinely trying to do right by its guests, which is more than some hotels at five times the price manage.

Why I think this corner survives

Pererenan beach is a proper beach, characterful and relaxed, and it reads completely differently from the crowded sand elsewhere in the region. I like sitting in one of the simple huts there watching the surfers, and I've done it for longer stretches than I'd care to admit.

I'm more hopeful about this street than about most places I've watched change on this island, and it isn't only sentiment. What's going up around here is villas rather than large hotels and apartment blocks, and that matters. A road lined with villas keeps its scale and its sightlines and its rice fields between them. A road that gets three hundred-key hotels does not, and after that the scooters at sunset go somewhere else.

So far they're still coming. That's the reason to go now.