Lake Victoria - Great Lake of Africa

Lake Victoria (Nam Lolwe in Luo;Nalubaale in Luganda; Nyanza inKinyarwanda and some Bantu languages)^[1] is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer John Hanning Speke, the first Briton to document it. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River. With a surface area of 68,800 km²(26,600 sq mi), Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area and the largest tropical lake in the world.^[5] Lake Victoria is the world's second largestfresh water lake by surface area, afterLake Superior in North America. In terms of volume, Lake Victoria is the world's ninth largest continental lake, containing about 2,750 cubic kilometres of water.

Lake Victoria receives its water primarily from direct rainfall and thousands of small streams. The Kagera River is the largest stream flowing into this lake, with its mouth on the lake's western shore. Lake Victoria is drained solely by the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, on the lake's northern shore. Lake Victoria occupies a shallow depression in Africa and has a maximum depth of 84 m (276 ft) and an average depth of 40 m (130 ft).Its catchment area covers 184,000 km²(71,000 sq mi). The lake has a shoreline of 4,828 km (3,000 mi), with islands constituting 3.7 percent of this length, and is divided among three countries:Kenya (6 percent or 4,100 km² or 1,600 sq mi), Uganda (45 percent or 31,000 km² or 12,000 sq mi), and Tanzania (49 percent or 33,700 km² or 13,000 sq mi).

The first recorded information about Lake Victoria comes from Arab traders plying the inland routes in search of gold, ivory, other precious commodities, and slaves. An excellent map, known as the Muhammad al-Idrisi map from the calligrapher who developed it and dated from the 1160s, clearly depicts an accurate representation of Lake Victoria, and attributes it as the source of the Nile. The lake was first sighted by a European in 1858 when the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore while on his journey with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate the Great Lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this "vast expanse of open water" for the first time, Speke named the lake after Queen Victoria.

Panoramic view of Lake Victoria

Arial view of Lolui Island, Lake Victoria, Uganda

Lolui Island Shore line, Lake Victoria

Rock gong - Lolui Island, Lake Victoria

Fishing in Lake Victoria

Fishing at Lake Victoria

Carrying people at Lake Victoria

Bismarck Rock (Tanzania) at Lake Victoria

Murchison Falls at Lake Victoria

Sunset at Lake Victoria

Wild Giraffe at shore of Lake Victoria

Safari at Lake Victoria

Picture Source: Collected from Internet