Maji Moto Hot Springs

This one will scald you

Before anything else about this site: Maji Moto in Lake Manyara National Park is not a swimming place. TANAPA’s park brochure gives the water as heated by volcanic activity to temperatures ranging from 40 °C to 76.5 °C, and the authority’s data service repeats the upper figure. Other accounts put the spring at around 60 °C. Every one of those numbers is well above the temperature at which water causes serious scalding within seconds.

It is looked at from a vehicle or on a ranger-guided walk, and it is left alone.

Why this needs saying

Maji moto is Swahili for hot water and it is the name of several unrelated places in Tanzania. Two of them are confused constantly, and the confusion is dangerous in one direction.

The other Maji Moto — also called Chemka and Kikuletwa — is near Moshi, roughly forty kilometres away in Hai District. It sits at around 27 °C. It is a clear, deep, swimmable spring-fed pool and it is what almost everybody means when they talk about hot spring swimming in Tanzania. The hot spring swimming guide covers it properly.

They are two different places, two hundred kilometres apart, sharing a name and differing by fifty degrees. If an itinerary offers a swim at Maji Moto, establish which one is meant.

What TANAPA publishes about the Manyara spring

The authority places it about thirty kilometres to the south of the park entrance, and describes the spring as spreading over a distance of two kilometres through fifteen channels which flow throughout the year even during prolonged drought. The mineral content of the water is locally associated with curative values, and TANAPA notes that it is an important source of food for the lesser flamingos on the lake — the algae that the warm mineral water supports.

The spring is visible evidence that this stretch of the Rift is still geologically active, which is the other reason to look at it.

Getting there, and why most people do not

Thirty kilometres south of the gate is the whole story. The overwhelming majority of Manyara visits are half-days on the way from Tarangire to Karatu, and a vehicle that has come to the park for two hours never reaches the springs.

Anyone with a full day has a genuine reason to keep driving south. The southern half of the park is far quieter than the groundwater forest at the northern gate, a long walkway runs out across the steaming rivulets and reed beds at the lake edge with a view up and down this part of the Rift, and old bull buffalo are often seen wallowing in the warm alkaline mud nearby.

There is a second way in that few itineraries use: a gravel road runs to the southern end of the park from Babati, and the southern gate allows a traverse of the full length of the park northwards — the route TANAPA itself recommends for visitors coming from Tarangire’s Sangaiwe gate.

Common questions