The Centre Bethanie

Centre Bethanie

After we left the wonderful guest house in Huye we drove to Kibuye to stay at the Centre Bethanie. (I forgot to mention I was feeling unwell in the evening that we stayed at Huye, so I begged off going to dinner with some of the ladies on the trip, which I kind of regret, considering that I was more or less ok all night. Linda went with them and had a great time. I stayed in my room and read a novel on my ipod. What a great gadget.) We would be going to visit a memorial site at Bisisero and the Centre Bethanie would be our headquarters for that trip. We had voted as a group to spend an extra night at this place. It was billed as having wireless internet and a TV in the rooms and an ensuite bathroom.

We arrived at the Centre in the late afternoon after a typical Rwandan drive up and down the thousand hills in that country. I think we found more hills than Rwanda knows it has, and I am so totally grateful for the invention of gravol. Without it, this trip would have been physically difficult as well as emotionally difficult. I found that if I took one gravol in the morning I was ok for the whole day of driving, even though the gravol theoretically wears off after five hours. On the safari for example, we bounced along on unpaved trackways through the bush for twelve hours, but I was ok on just the one gravol that I took before we left the game lodge.

The Centre Bethanie Guest House is located on a scenic little peninsula on Lake Kivu, on the extreme west side of Rwanda. When I heard we were going to Lake Kivu, I got a little nervous. Lake Kivu is one of only three so-called “exploding” lakes in the world. The other two lakes are in Cameroon. The lake is called an exploding lake because it is situated atop a magma field (the area is actively volcanic) and the water intermingles with a volcano, causing it to have large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane dissolved in it at great depth. As well as being an exploding lake, Kivu is also a meromictic lake. For one thing, meromictic lakes are extremely deep. That means that the water at the different levels does not turn over on a yearly basis, indeed, the water in meromictic lakes does not mingle between the layers of the lake at all. This makes them very unusual. I think there are only two or three meromictic lakes in Canada and a few in the US. Lucky for us, our meromictic lakes do not have the added feature of being exploding lakes as well. The reason I mention this is that if these lakes turned over naturally every year like all non-meromictic lakes do, then the buildup of gas would not be an issue. The water would turn over in the spring, the gas would be released, and because there would not be a chance for lethal amounts of gas to build up in a year, that would be the end of it. The problem with the exploding lakes is that they can go hundreds of years without a turnover, and the turnover is not natural, rather it is caused by a violent seismic event. From time to time over the past millennia, triggered by some type of volcanic activity either under the water or in the general vicinity, the lake experiences a violent turnover of the water, which releases the methane and carbon dioxide, which are normally trapped by the water pressure (the lake is more than 500 meters deep) into the local atmosphere and all the birds and animals, including people, which live in the area are killed. This last happened in Cameroon in the basin surrounding Lake Nyos on August 21, 1986. The release of gases from the lake was caused by an underwater landslide triggered by volcanic activity. About 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock were suffocated by the release of the gas. Were this to happen around lake Kivu, which straddles the border between Congo and Rwanda, the results would be catastrophic (not that the death of 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock wasn’t a catastrophe) because about two million people live in the Lake Kivu basin on both sides of the border. They would likely all be killed along with all of their livestock, as well as wildlife in the area. Geologists who study Lake Kivu say there is evidence of “sporadic biological extinction” in the basin, as they so quaintly put it. How Lake Kivu’s explosive turnovers are triggered is unknown, but just as with the lakes in Cameroon, volcanic activity is suspected. As I say, Lake Kivu is situated in an area with fairly significant volcanic activity. And furthermore, as the gas escapes in a violent turnover, some geologists also believe it can cause tsunamis in the lake due to the large displacements of water. You get everything with this lake! So what a hotel this is: a very scenic view on a lake that could kill you with no warning.

Clearly, it is in Rwanda’s best interest (and Congo’s too, but its government is largely ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst) to see what can be done to get the carbon dioxide and methane out of the lake. Apparently it is fairly easy to remove the gas: all that needs to be done is insert pipes down to the deep parts of the lake (which is pretty much all of it), and start pumping up water. As the water rises up the pipe, the pressure is reduced and the carbon dioxide and methane just bubble right out of the water. This could be a great way for Rwanda to solve an energy problem: the methane at the bottom of the lake could be captured and burned to create electricity. I regaled all of my travel mates with this info as we drove to the lake.  This is a thing that all geography teachers know. Imagine my delight to find that there was a group of engineers staying at the hotel, and they were doing research into the lake, trying to determine the best way of getting rid of the gas held deep in the water. They prefer the pipe method: the government should have hired geography teachers instead.  I gave that information away for free.

So we arrived at the guesthouse. I am not sure if I mentioned earlier that Rwanda has an odd idea of what gravel is. The gravel-covered parking lots (and remember paving is not necessary in parking lots in Rwanda because there is no snow to worry about) have stone pieces about the size of an adult’s fist, for the small stones, and about the size of a child’s head for the large stones. And people drive over this in regular passenger cars as well as busses. And it is loose, not packed in. Every time I stepped out of the bus onto one of these gravel parking lots I feared that I would either fall or turn over my ankle. Try carrying your suitcase and assorted other bags over this - it is like a debris field. There were two levels of parking, both gravel-covered, both outside, but one was on a higher level than the other. Lucky for us, Olivier unloaded us in the higher of the two parking levels. Then we looked up (and like the Friendly Giant says – Way Up) to see the Reception Office two levels above that. So up we go with our bags and stuff. And everyone was laden down because we had had a chance to purchase baskets etc at the museum in Huye and also many people went shopping for souvenirs in Huye. I think that is where I purchased the Rwandan Nativity Scene I have. While I was waiting to get my room key, I turned on my ipod and was delighted to find there was wifi and that I could connect. We were given our keys and off we trooped with our stuff to find them.

We were all housed in two rows of terraced rooms, with each room being on a different level than the one above or below it. It was all quite jolly and scenic, I thought, as Linda and I wandered off with the group, in search of our lodgings. Some of the people broke off from our group at the first row of rooms and the rest of us were in the second row. So we started down the stairs to the second row. Elizabeth and Jackie were in the first room, Langdon and Stephanie were in the second room, and Graham and Jeff were in the third level down. Then there were two more rooms. And then we came to our room. Linda and I were in the lower-most room in that row, about eight flights of stairs down. When Linda sends me the photos, I will post them. I don’t think I took any photos of the centre Bethanie. Probably because I was too winded with going up and down the stairs.

We entered our room and were very happy with what we saw. The room was large. There was a short hallway from the door to the bedroom and on the right hand side of the hallway was a closet and shelves. We put our bags down on the shelves. We had two nice chairs in the room and the beds were a good size too. The bathroom was quite large by Rwandan standards (bigger even than our washroom at the Game Lodge, and, as we would soon find out, bigger than our bathroom at the Milles Collines). The room had smooth cement floors, which was fairly standard in Rwandan rooms. The room was nice and clean.

I should mention that each room had an outdoor verandah, and ours was quite lovely, in fact, I thought it was the nicest of the all the verandahs in our group. We had two nice wooden patio-style chairs (but not like Kawartha chairs) and our verandah, like all the others had stone planters all around it. In the planters were all sorts of beautiful flowering and non-flowering plants. There were dieffenbachia, purple hearts, begonias, palms and many other local plants. There were similar plants in the planters of the other rooms as you went up the stairs. Across from us was a view of the back of the rooms on the terrace in front of us. Even the backs of the rooms were nicely landscaped. Charles and Olivier were directly across from us. There was even what appeared to be a poinsettia tree part way up the stairs. It was beautiful. And we were right beside a little lagoon on the lee side of the peninsula that the hotel was on. Despite the stairs, it was actually a scenic and pleasant little space.

But we arrived when the hotel was having a water crisis, so there was no water to flush the toilet more than once a day, no water in the tap for washing hands, no water in shower for having a shower. Not only was there no water in our room, there was intermittently no water in the other people’s rooms.

When we arrived in the room, we noticed that there was a plastic basin in the bathroom, as well as a five gallon jerry can full of water. This was not cause for worry as I had read in many Rwandan guide books and guide sites on the internet, that frequently the water supply is lost, so you are given fair warning by the presence of the basin or bucket, and that you should fill it up right away against a theoretical loss. If no such loss happens, you can use the water (and not waste it) by pouring it in the toilet to flush, and saving the water in the toilet tank for a future flush. If you see the basin, and you don’t fill it up, and then you lose water, you will be met by mighty indifference at the reception desk. There was a basin in our washroom at the guesthouse in Huye. I filled it immediately but did not need it to use it, so we had several flushes from it. I saw the basin at the Centre Bethanie and immediately set out to fill it from the shower, where it had been placed. Imagine my surprise when only a two minute dribble of water came out of the shower, and I managed to gather only about an inch of water in the basin. As sort of rising panic set in. I like to be able to flush a toilet after I use it.  I tried the sink. Water came out for about 3 seconds. More panic. It had been a long journey and I had to use the toilet. I bit the bullet; I used the toilet, and tried to flush. Wonder of wonders, it flushed. No worries I said to Linda, we may not have a shower or sink, but by gosh, we’ve got a toilet. I said we could have a sponge shower with water from the jerry can in the morning. Great she said. Then she went to use the toilet. No flush for Linda. So she had to wrestle with the jerry can. It was full and weighed 50 pounds. She tried lifting the jerry can to pour water in the toilet, but I prevailed upon her to just tip water into the basin and then use the basin to flush, which she did, with success. But who wants to be going to all of that trouble in the middle of the night? My evening was filled with anxiety in anticipation of a nighttime jerry can episode. And very lucky for us, we had also purchased a two gallon bottle of fresh water from the market in Huye, so we had plenty of water for brushing our teeth and washing our faces.

I only had one bottle of Sprite at dinner so that I would minimize the number of times I might have to go to the washroom. All went well in the night, and I was able to have a dribble shower (but a quick dribble shower -  no more than two minutes long) in the morning. And the toilet flushed. So it only took 24 hours to fill the toilet tank. In theory that meant we would have one more flush before we left the hotel the next morning.

So I went up to brekkie with Linda. I should say up and then down. First we had to climb the equivalent of about eight flights of stairs, (not just eight sets of stairs either, I mean the height of about 6 storeys in an apartment, easily) just to get to the reception level, and then down the same amount to get to the dining room. To get back to our room, of course, the same journey must be had, in reverse. And the stairs were made by the Uneven Riser Company, so some of the stairs were normal, but in a typical flight of stairs, you would find the odd stair that was much larger or smaller than the others. It keeps you on your toes.

I discovered when I went to check my email that the wifi was not working.  No water, no wifi, and by the way, no TV in the room.  Had I known this was what was in store, I would not have voted to spend the extra night here. If there is no water, how can a restaurant prepare food safely? I resolved to only eat deep fried food while at the Centre Bethanie on the understanding that any germs on the food would be deep fried as well and unlikely to survive to make me sick.

When I mentioned to the woman at the reception centre that there was no water in my room, she said she knew that. In Canada or the US if there was no water, the hotel would have been all over you with refunds and offers of free weekends. No water in Rwanda is not unusual at all, it seems, and no cause for a hotel to feel it owes you anything, if it has billed itself as a place with toilets and taps, even if those toilets and taps don’t work.

On our second night there, when I went up then down for dinner, as I was leaving our room (I was alone because Linda had gone on a boat tour with the others who were still at the Centre Bethanie. Seven of the group had left earlier in the day to catch a bus to go Gorilla trekking. More on that later) to join the others after their boat tour, I heard the person in the room next to me literally frolicking in his shower. I could hear the sound of water pressure and a happy showerer. So as I sat down at our table, I mentioned casually, in a how-come-he-gets-a-shower-and-I-don’t sort of way, that the guy next to me was having a dandy shower, and immediately Graham and Jeff, two fellows on our trip, jumped up and said they were going back to the room, one at a time, to shower. And they did. And then they came back, one at a time, all happy and chipper that they had been able to have a shower. So when we went back to our room, we tested our shower. No water beyond a trickle. The trickle that came out was handy though, because I discovered that if I put the shower head in the basin as I started to go the washroom, by the time I was finished (and how long is that, really) the water would run out, but I would have enough water in the basin to flush the toilet. So we were able to flush every time, just not in the normal manner.

On the last day, before breakfast, we were having an impromptu gathering on our little verandah. It was quite pleasant. Graham came by, it was 10:30 and he took everyone’s orders for lunch. He said he was going up (and down) to the restaurant to preorder lunch for us, in hopes that it would be ready by noon, because we needed to go back to Kigali that afternoon, and we wanted to go at such a time that it would still be light when we got back. At the restaurant at the hotel (and indeed in all of the restaurants that we went to in Rwanda except for buffets) it regularly took about 45 minutes to get served and over an hour to have the food delivered to the table.

When it came time to go, Linda and I were packed and ready early. Despite the lack of water, and the seemingly-endless stairs, I really enjoyed the Centre Bethanie. I had a good time with good friends. The scenery was beautiful. Our room was great (not including the water part). The hotel staff were all nice and friendly. I will definitely go to this hotel again when I return to Rwanda. Strangely enough, even though Rwanda was not my home, I was thinking of Kigali as my home base, and I was ready to return there. Also, I was worried that the lake would pick the time that we were there to have its first violent turnover in a thousand years. I didn’t feel like suffocating in a fog of carbon dioxide and methane gas, and so the sooner we were away from Lake Kivu, the happier I would be.