Put on the map by Jane Goodall and her paradigm-shifting primates in the 1960s, Central Africa's Lake Tanganyika and its granite-boulder–strewn island beaches are being reconceived as a freshwater Seychelles. Susan Hack fishes, snorkels, sails, and hits the beach in Tanzania, where the livin' is easy (if you don't count the tsetses) and the chimps channel Shakespeare

In 1871, it took Henry Morton Stanley 236 days to march twelve hundred miles from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika, where he found Dr. David Livingstone, missing and presumed dead, resting under a mango tree. My five-hour plane ride from Arusha fast-forwards through Tanzania's vistas but does nothing to diminish the sensation of crossing into another world. Passing over hilly coffee plantations, desiccated bush, and pods of fat hippos in Katavi National Park, my chartered Cessna is suddenly level with a wall of 8,000-foot-high mountains. Beneath bigheaded clouds, the plane starts a tight corkscrew landing, bumping to a stop on a red-dirt ribbon ending at Lake Tanganyika's shore. "Always better to run out of airstrip facing water than a mountain," chirps the lady pilot, a trim American blond, before saying good-bye and launching skyward.

There's no cell phone signal, so I wait with my suitcase in a cement gazebo surrounded by elephant grass, the blue of Africa's deepest lake stretching toward the purple serrated ridgeline of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Curious children dressed in rags approach shyly. They are Bembe people, offspring of Congolese refugees who have squatted on the border of Tanzania's Mahale Mountains National Park for the last twenty years.

A dhow (the name Tanganyika derives from the Swahili words tanga, or sail, and nyika, meaning wilderness) shows up to collect me for the ninety-minute voyage to my base for the next three days—Greystoke Mahale, a resort on a beach not far from one of Stanley and Livingstone's campsites. Hugging the coast, we leave signs of human habitation behind and are dwarfed by a series of verdant ridges falling to a narrow shoreline of rocky coves and white sand crescents.

This slug-shaped inland sea—410 miles long and from 10 to 50 miles wide—was "discovered" in 1858 by Richard Burton and John Manning Speke, Victorian explorers on a mission to find the source of the Nile. (Arab caravans had reached the lake more than a decade earlier, shipping ivory and slaves back to the Sultan of Zanzibar.) Among today's travelers, Tanganyika is famous for its chimpanzees. It was at Gombe Stream, in the hills above the lake, that Jane Goodall in the early 1960s first witnessed primates stripping leaves off twigs and using them to fish termites from mounds, forever dispelling our notion of man as the sole toolmaker. Recognizing the need to preserve chimp habitat, the Tanzanian government created Gombe Stream National Park in 1968 and the much larger Mahale Mountains National Park in 1980.

Because of its remoteness and relatively primitive infrastructure, Lake Tanganyika—bordered by Tanzania, Burundi, Congo, and Zambia—has received remarkably few visitors in the years since. This may soon change, however, for tourism entrepreneurs thirsting for untrodden destinations are starting to eye the lake and its islands as Africa's new, freshwater Seychelles.