Lake Tanganyika at Saga Beach is the city beach of Bujumbura, the largest city of Burundi, on the northern tip of the longest freshwater lake in the world, 673 kilometres of warm turquoise water running south between the mountains of Congo on the far shore and the hills of Burundi, and it is an afternoon of pale sand and thatched bars with the fishermen's dugouts coming in at dusk. The lake is the second deepest on Earth after Baikal, holding a sixth of the world's fresh water, so old that it has bred its own fish, hundreds of cichlids found nowhere else, some of the smallest of which spend their entire lives inside empty snail shells; Saga is a few kilometres north of the city centre, where the sand meets a reed fringe, the water is warm enough to stay in for hours, with the Congo mountains going purple across the water in the last hour of light, when the dugouts come in. The boats are cut from single trunks and paddled by hand, with no engine and no hurry, and they take visitors out along the shore.
By day the ndagala boats lie moored in the shallows with their long booms crossed above the hulls and nobody aboard, because these crews work at night, hanging lamps over the water to draw the sardines up and netting them under the light, so that after dark the lake is dotted with lamps; the sardines shoal in the northern basin from May and June, when the dry season begins and the plankton blooms. A rock twelve kilometres south of the city carries two carved names and the date 25 XI 1871, where Livingstone and Stanley slept on their journey along the lake, and a Nile crocodile said to run to six metres, Gustave, has haunted the Rusizi river mouth north of the beach for decades. Saga is a beach on an inland sea, and the far shore is another country.