Lac Tison and the Vina Falls

Ngaoundéré sits on the Adamawa plateau at around 1,100 m, the coolest and greenest part of Cameroon, and two of its best short walks are within 15 km of the city. Lac Tison is a small crater lake reached by a track that climbs a low ridge just south of town; the Vina Falls, a little further along the same road towards Meiganga, drop over a rock shelf on the Vina river barely 200 m from the roadside.

The walk links the two: up from the southern edge of Ngaoundéré to Lac Tison, then back down to the road and on to the falls, all on plateau grassland and farm track with wide-open skies and Fulani cattle for company. Neither site takes long or asks much fitness — the appeal is the plateau itself, cool enough to actually enjoy walking in a way most of Cameroon at this latitude is not.

For those with an extra day, the Chutes de Tello — a 45 m fall with a wide cavern behind the drop — sit about 60 km east of Ngaoundéré on the Bélel track, but they are a separate half-day trip in their own right rather than an extension of this walk. Ngaoundéré is the northern terminus of the Douala–Ngaoundéré railway, which makes both of these an unusually easy add-on for anyone arriving by train rather than road.