Kibuye is the best place on earth! (official)

Feb 9

Slept very well and woke up determined to make the most of Kibuye. Hot showers help, and finding my spare tee-shirt and trousers have more or less dried overnight is good start. None of the others are up, so I explore the place and take some early morning pictures across the lake. Discover that Bethanie is on a very beautiful site, literally at the water’s edge. Lots of interesting birds: cormorants, a tiny wren, a little finch with dusty red head, another with electric blue head and shoulders, wagtails, and others with crests like miniature hoopoes.

Lake Kivu is so beautiful. The coast isn’t straight; it’s dotted with islands and serrated with hundreds of little bays and gulfs, so that you can’t easily grasp its full size. Out in the far distance, a grey smudge in the early morning light, was land, but whether it was the proper Congolese shore or the big peninsula that sticks half way up the lake I couldn’t tell.

The Bethanie lists a bathing place as one of its attractions, but the bit we found looked murky and uninviting. Lots of boatmen were pestering us to charter them out to the islands, but their prices were for tourists and rich NGO officials.

Eventually the girls surfaced and we pampered ourselves with cooked breakfasts and buckets of coffee. We’d all decided the Bethanie, though nice, was too expensive. The Centre St Jean, also in Kibuye and also next to the lake, was cheaper. So we packed up and marched out through the mid-morning heat and humidity.

Next to the Centre St Jean is the genocide memorial church. Awful things happened in this little lakeside town in 1994. The town had an unusually high percentage of Tutsis in its population, and others flooded in thinking they would be safe here. They were wrong. By the time the French got their act together and came to sort things out, only 6000 out of 60 000 were left. And there were other desperate tales of survival and slaughter in the cold and wet forests at the top of the rift valley. None of this is apparent today, of course, but the church, big and incongruous in its setting (it’s on the site of a previous one inside which terrified Tutsis huddled while the mobs outside used explosives to blast their way in and kill literally every single person) is a powerful reminder through its sheer bulk.

But to dwell on all this slaughter is to spoil what turned out to be a perfect day. The Centre St Jean, like the Béthanie, is owned by one of the local churches. From the moment we got there it felt welcoming and just right. We got our rooms (mine a cosy little cell at the bottom of a tower, like a corner of a French chateau), peeled off in a hurry and went for a swim in the lake. The weather was stifling hot and we were sizzling!

Marisa had arrived from Nyamagata, and Samira on her moped from Gikongoro, but only after a traumatic run during which she had been knocked off her bike by a careless cyclist and had badly sprung two fingers. When we first saw her she was still a bit in shock, but the presence of a load of friends and the odd bottle of beer soon changed all that.

The hostel sits on top of a steep, conical hill well above the lake but with simply unbeatable views across the little inlets and twisty arms of water. While the water’s edge is rocky and slimy (the only concession made to help swimmers is to throw cement over some of the sharpest rocks at the water’s edge), the water itself was warm. Here at Kibuye there are no crocodiles, or snakes, or bilharzias snails, or methane eruptions from the lakebed – its safe swimming. Pure bliss – we realised how much we were missing the sea back in England!

After swimming we sunbathed, then ate a huge lunch, then lazed and swam the afternoon away. And ate again after watching the sun set over the rift valley, with lightning flickering over the Congolese side of the lake and great booming claps of thunder in the distance.

This being Rwanda, the power kept going on and off, but by nine o’clock we were all so thoroughly chilled out that we decided it was time for bed, even though the air was warm. Kibuye has a lot more mozzies than we’re used to, and several of had got sunburnt even through cloudy skies. (The tops of my feet were absolutely on fire!)

Thunder banged and crashed all night, but the big storm never reached us.

Best thing about today – chillin’ in a lovely place with good friendsWorst thing about today – nothing. It doesn’t get much better than this!