With a surface area of 70,000 sq km, Victoria is the second largest freshwater lake in the world. It is the largest tropical lake in the world. It is however remarkably shallow for its size, never reaching more than 80m in depth. The lake was named after Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, by John Hanning Speke, the first European to discover this lake.

Lake Tanganyika is vast (32,900 sq kms), which makes it larger than Belgium. The longest freshwater lake in the world, it is also the second deepest after Russia’s Lake Baikal. Plunging to depths of more than 1,433 metres, the lake stretches 677 kilometres north to south and averages 50 kilometres across. Much of the lake’s water is lost to evaporation and, since 1962; the lake is thought to have dropped by as much as 45cms a year.