Within a few minutes of wandering around I discovered tattered history, the likes of which was wholly museum-worthy. A decrepit but grand conference room offered tattered 70s-era armchairs under old framed tourist promotion posters of the Zaire Mobuto once terrorized, and the ballroom/bar next door took the comfort up a notch with worn plush-velvet couches along each wall. A man, likely an employee, was camped out for the night on one of them; though there seemed to be plenty of people associated with the hotel, I got the distinct impression that we were the only guests.
Going a bit farther down the hall led me to a once-magnificent courtyard overgrown with roses. I felt something akin to what the first underwater excavators of the Titanic must have felt upon swimming through the wide, empty rooms crusted with age. (I began taking pictures like mad.)
Getting a bit bolder and intensely curious about what this hotel had seen in its day, I began poking my nose into more private corners, actively searching now for any clue that would tell me how old the rambling resort was. At one end I discovered a long-empty swimming pool, at another a stripped beauty salon; holes along the peeling walls of each corridor belied the one-time presence of fine wood paneling. It was not until I really 
began to pry, however, that I discovered the jackpot - the walled-in land behind the employees' (servants'?) quarters had become a proper dump. Piles of rotting furniture, an old wooden trunk that reminded David of his grandmother's, a huge set of once-mounted horns, the secret hiding place of all the toilet seats I've been missing, and - the treasure - a pre-electric adding machine that dated at least from the forties, and probably considerably before.
Gaze at it in all its pre-modern glory...I was ecstatic. Just as I had both hoped and expected, Hôtel des Grands Lacs had lived through Independence.
After questioning both the Maitre d' Monsieur Lola and the Belgian at the tourist desk, David and I began to reconstruct what must have happened to the place. We found out the hotel dated from 1948, built of Belgian construction probably as a posh colonial hangout for the friends of white settlers and governmental VIPs back in the good old days when Congo was still Belgium's heart of darkness.
The beauty salon, the rose garden, the adding machine all fit in perfectly with the white expat lifestyle of 1950s Congo.Then with Independence in 1961, the white guests would have been chased away by the frightening concept of an independent African president, soon to be followed by the owners themselves with the much more legitimately alarming presidency of Mobuto. "Zaïrianisation" likely would have resulted in governmental seizure of the hotel anyway for its own use or distribution to well-connected friends, though the lack of renovations or even upkeep much past the sixties suggests that apparently the tourism industry during the period wasn't at its height. Then with civil war would have come refugees and possibly owner abandonment, explaining why so much 70s-era furniture had been dumped out back but never replaced. Refugees would have had their own, and would have used the furniture and wood paneling only as firewood.
Which brings us more or less up to date, and explains my spacious hotel room with its stained walls, minimal furniture and a bathroom out of 1960. Since peace, a wealthy Rwandan has apparently acquired the place through connections with the government, and stirrings of lackadaisical construction (and re-construction) have begun on the grounds. A pile of tan brick surrounds the gutted pool, and cans of plaster, spackle and paint sit idly in the hallway. Who knows, perhaps the Hôtel des Grands Lacs is headed for glory once more... though I think I like it best as it is.
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