About Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania

The first Europeans to encounter Lake Tanganyika were the British explorers Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, in 1887. Beginning on the eastern coast, they crossed Tanzania in search of the source of the Nile, finally coming upon the shores of this seemingly endless and bottomless body of water after months of great deprivation. Though this was not the mythic headwater of the great Nile (it is actually Lake Victoria, to the north), the sheer size of this lake, the world’s longest at 446 mi. (714 km), made it a geographical bonanza in itself. At the northern end of Tanganyika is Gombe Stream National Park, where Jane Goodall conducts her celebrated studies of chimpanzees.