A little after dawn on a matchless morning in Kenya’s Masai Mara a group of riders and horses stood quietly in the first warming rays of the sun watching a herd of cow elephants with their young browsing a tree covered ridge.

Five minutes later we were galloping for our lives, hearts pounding, crouched low over our horses’ necks as a dozen angry elephant charged down the slope towards us, trumpeting their displeasure. They moved at an astonishing speed, not stopping until they had thoroughly routed the enemy, and when we finally slowed up and turned to look back, they were grouped closely in the bowl of the valley, glaring at us.

As we gathered ourselves together and moved quietly off, adrenalin still coursing through our bodies, half gasping, half laughing with the terror and exhilaration and relief of it all, some of us might have been thinking of a quiet ride back to camp to recover, but our guide had other plans.

“Right,” he said, “Let’s go and find that cheetah kill.”

A walk on the wild side of Kenya

Who’s that burping at the back? Will Hide enjoys the best caravan holiday of his life on a four-day walking safari in Kenya

BACKGROUND

• Nairobi to Mombassa by train

• Briton challenges Kenya tourism scam

• Massaged by the Masai

BACKGROUND

• What's the best way to get a Kenya visa?

• Running wild in Kenya

• Kenya: falling in love again

BACKGROUND

• Aaronovitch on a family safari of Zambia

• Where to go for safari and surf

• On safari in Tanzania

• My fright on a bike safari

• African monkey trail

It was day three of a week’s riding in the Mara and we’d learned that Tristan Voorspuy’s sentences often began that way: “Let’s spread out and see if we can collect a few wildebeest,” or “Let’s trot on and cover a bit of ground.” ("Trotting on" generally meant a fast canter, dodging aardvark holes, ducking branches and taking sharp diversions to jump a fallen tree).

We’d be sitting round the camp fire after dinner, nursing a single malt and thinking about possibly turning in and Tristan would say, “Right, let’s get the jeep and see if we can find some lion.” After 25 years leading riding safaris across the Kenyan wilderness, his enthusiasm for the job is apparently undimmed.

So we left the elephant in peace and returned to the spot where, the evening before, we’d watched from the jeep as a young male cheetah made inroads into his kill, a pregnant impala. Twelve hours later, there was little trace, just an area of flattened grass, a smear of blood and a fugitive scent picked up by the horses, flaring their nostrils delicately. Hyenas would have been in the night to clean up, said Tristan, eating what was left and carrying the larger bones back to their lair.

Really it was lucky we’d got the elephant charge over before breakfast because as it turned out, there would be so much more to pack into that day: a rare encounter with a hippo on land, trundling along the path in front of us; a herd of 50 or 60 giraffe who cantered obligingly beside us with their lovely rocking motion and, in the afternoon, an unscheduled stand off with a bull elephant during a walk to a swimming hole.

He was alarmingly close by the time we spotted him and moved hesitantly towards us, flapping his ears which is not really a good sign. “It’s only a bull,” said Tristan calmly as we cowered in the long grass; the insouciance of being on horseback had vanished, replaced with a bowel loosening sense of vulnerability. “Just keep together and walk on quietly,” advised our leader, a rifle tucked under his arm. I didn’t know if it would stop an elephant and hoped we wouldn’t find out.

And then, as a grand finale to a day already filled with more excitement than was truly necessary, we spent two miraculous, star filled night hours watching the serial rendezvous of a group of young sibling lions: first we tracked two, then they met three more and there was much purring and rolling about and kissing followed by a bit of wandering off before a languorous tryst with another two.

There were nine of them in the end, hanging out like teenagers discussing which club to go on to, strolling so close to the jeep we could hear the swish of dry grass as they passed. The idea should have been to go hunting, said Tristan, but thanks to plentiful game, their bellies were full and they really couldn’t be bothered.

All our days were that good in their different ways: as well as moments of high drama, there were long contemplative rides spread out in companionable silence; furious heart quickening gallops over wide plains with the dust of several hundred wildebeest kicking up around us; golden evenings watching zebra grazing quietly and saddle deep river crossings between wallowing hippo.