Tanzania: Life on Mars?

One interesting place we visited two days ago was depicted on the map as Hot Springs - some 36km from the entrance to Lake Manyara National Park's main entrance. It took several hours to get there along the dirt track - mostly becasue there's a heck of a lot of great wildlife to see enroute; from tiny crimson Red Bishop finches (Lucie help! Not sure if this is really a finch), to herds of tall, dark Maasai giraffe. Somehow the water from the spring forces itself out of the escarpment face at lake level and oozes down onto the shores of Lake Manyara - where the Cape Buffalo and hippos enjoy a Radox bath. From the track above it's nothing more than a red stain on the green shoreline, but get closer and you get to see all manner of weird shapes, colours and smells as this mineral-rich water flushes out of the rocks into the lake. It's way too hot to touch and, according to the notice posted by the road, contains 'every mineral from radium to sulphur'. I was disappointed to discover afterwards that I didn't glow in the dark. It provided a massive challenge for the camera's White Balance setting so I simply set it to RAW and let the software work out the best combination of red and yellow.
Here are some examples (that's Melanie Mannix from Dubai with the EF100-400mm. Bottom two frames: Janice Gursanscky).