Lake Chad

Lake Chad has shrunk to roughly a tenth of the extent it held in the nineteen sixties and is now a maze of low islands and reed channels rather than open water. Bol on its eastern shore is the provincial capital and the place pirogues leave from. The Buduma live out on the islands with their long horned kouri cattle, which swim between the pastures. Women's cooperatives harvest spirulina from the shallows and the dried fish trade runs south from here. The lake basin is an active Boko Haram operating area under repeated states of emergency, so it cannot be treated as a place to plan a visit to.