title: world map without rivers with matplotlib / Basemap?
body: <p>Would there be a way to plot the borders of the continents with Basemap (or without Basemap, if there is some other way), without those annoying rivers coming along? Especially that piece of Kongo River, not even reaching the ocean, is disturbing.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I intend to further plot data over the map, like in the <a href="http://matplotlib.org/basemap/users/examples.html">Basemap gallery</a> (and still have the borderlines of the continents drawn as black lines over the data, to give structure for the worldmap) so while the solution by Hooked below is nice, masterful even, it's not applicable for this purpose.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/QFIK3.png" alt="world map"></p>
  
  <p>Image produced by:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  
  fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 4.5))
  plt.subplots_adjust(left=0.02, right=0.98, top=0.98, bottom=0.00)
  m = Basemap(projection='robin',lon_0=0,resolution='c')
  m.fillcontinents(color='gray',lake_color='white')
  m.drawcoastlines()
  plt.savefig('world.png',dpi=75)
  </code></pre>