Yesterday December 29th, I drove guests to Lake Bosumtwe. They wanted to ride horses at the wonderful Green Ranch. And here’s another post on the Four Villages Inn WordPress blog.
So we get to the district assembly’s barrier at the cusp of the crater where the road descends to the lake and the village of Abono. It is here that local authorities always collect GH C 2.00 from foreigners and GH C1 from locals on the pretext of road maintenance.
But what’s going on today? There are four cars lined up already at the barrier and there are a lot of people arguing. Somebody approaches our car and demands GH C10 each from us to go to festivities at the lake. We explain that we are going to the Green Ranch to ride horses, but he says everyone has to pay to go past the barrier. We hear details that an individual has organized a party and has paid local authorities for permission to charge admission. We then establish that I am local so all told it’s GH C 25! I ask how long this is going on for and am told 3 days!
As we drove past we see cars in line already packed with kids. Sad….My guest, a tourist from Europe here in Ghana for about a week, yells out at the goons manning the barrier that these kind of tactics will hurt businesses by the lake.
At the lake we went to Rainbow Garden Village Guest House near to the Green Ranch to swim. But that’s a no-go because the water close to the shoreline is covered by a diarrhea brown film. It’s been like that for months, but now it seems that the pollution extends further out from the shore. On a previous visit to the lake, I had been explained that it was fireflies, yes fireflies. that there weren’t enough fish in the lake to eat the fireflies that settled on the lake. Thus they died and disintegrated causing the brown film.
This time Elodie from The Green Ranch says the pollution all around the lake has been caused by a fish farm that was established without authorization….
And….my wife from that area thinks that another possible cause might be runoff from galamsey, that is illegal gold mining operations. But who knows???? What is known though is people from the over twenty villages scattered around the lake are complaining, complaining big time!
And of course you’ve read in this blog about the cutting down of a magnificent kapok tree close to the shoreline as the ECG (Electrical Company of Ghana) extends power lines around the lake making no effort whatsoever to skirt these wonders of nature. Elodie informed me that more glorious trees have fallen to ECG’s chain saws.
WHAT A PITY LAKE BOSUMTWE AND ITS TOURISM POTENTIAL IS BEING SPOILED.
MADinGhana's Blog 
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September 7, 2013
is really sad whats happening to lake bosomtwe because it has great potential. It seems the public awareness is also increasing as the folks at http://askmeghana.com are receiving several questions concerning the lake and its delima