Lake Victoria

Lake Victoria has occupied a place in the imagination of visitors to Africa for centuries. In the nineteenth century, the mystery of the origins of the Nile brought explorers such as David Livingstone and Richard Burton returning time and time again to Africa, but the glory of the first ‘discovery’ of the Nile’s source lies with the figure of John Hanning Speke, who proved that rivers from large areas of Western Kenya, Northern Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda gather in this shallow (only 80m deep) lake and begin, as the Victoria Nile, their 6000km journey to the Mediterranean Sea. Today’s explorers are more likely to seek out tranquil, glassy waters, spectacular sunsets and a slice of Tanzanian life far from the radar of the average tourist.