No swimming

Lake Victoria or Victoria Nyanza is one of the African Great Lakes and the second widest mass of fresh water in the world. Today it's battling the invasion by exotic fish species, water hyacinth (making it a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes and pollution.

The lake was named for Queen Victoria by John Hanning Speke, the first European to visit this lake in 1858 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. Burton, who had been recovering from illness at the time and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was outraged that Speke claimed to have proved his discovery to have been the true source of the Nile, which Burton regarded as still unsettled. A very public quarrel ensued, which not only sparked a great deal of intense debate within the scientific community of the day, but much interest by other explorers keen to either confirm or refute Speke's discovery.

The famous British explorer and missionary David Livingstone failed in his attempt to verify Speke's discovery, instead pushing too far west and entering the River Congo system instead. It was ultimately the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, on an expedition funded by the New York Herald newspaper, who confirmed the truth of Speke's discovery, circumnavigating the lake and reporting the great outflow at Ripon Falls on the lake's northern shore.