Mike Strobel with baby rhino at the Kenya animal sanctuary. (Cindy Sosrouto/QMI Agency)

Kenya is a land of dramas, big and small. A few magical moments on safari:

-- Deep in the grassy Masai Mara, near a glossy gardenia tree, we chance upon a cheetah.

A young male. As our safari wagon draws close, he rises on his haunches. His problem is clear to see. A gory gash mars his front right leg. Likely, says guide Peter Kamau, the big cat tangled with a warthog mom. Such a wound can be death in this breathtaking, unrelenting land.

Even we hard-bitten journos awww and oooh. Kamau says, unconvincingly, that the cheetah looks well-fed, so the injury may not be hindering his hunting.

We're all lost in our own thoughts about the cat's future, when all of a sudden he rolls on his back and plays like a barnyard kitten.

For five minutes, he flops about. We grin. Perhaps fate will be kind. Or not. You never know in Kenya.

-- Later we interrupt another cheetah lunching on a baby Thompson's gazelle, whose mother watches mournfully 100 metres away.

-- About 300 klicks southeast, nearing dusk, our Land Cruiser barrels around a bend on the red, red road and screeches to a halt.

We are chrome to tusk with a lone bull elephant. It is huge, maybe 10 tonnes and, oh, four metres at the shoulder. I'm not getting out to measure.

Its ears stick straight out, the first sign of a charge. Funny, but they're shaped like Africa. Then they start to flap, the second sign of a charge.

Peter frowns. "Oh, yes, this is serious," he says, seriously. He revs our big Land Cruiser. Back off buddy, so to speak. For five minutes we face the bull. We've all heard about Land Cruiser shish kebabs. Locals fear bull elephants as much as lions, buffalo and hippos.

Then Peter floors 'er. The safari-mobile leaps like a gazelle past the elephant, which swivels and lurches, ears flapping, as we bounce down the road, laughing and high-fiving in a cloud of red dust.

-- At 4 o'clock on the morning the migrating wildebeest mob crosses the Mara River, our headlights suddenly blaze upon a pride of lions noshing on a gnu.

They scatter like ghosts so quickly into the pitch-black that for a second I'm not sure what we've seen: A dozen or so adults and cubs covered in wildebeest gore.

-- In the tawny brush of Tsavo we catch a glimpse of the shy kudu, like the ones that thrilled Ernest Hemingway in the Green Hills of Africa. I'm thrilled, too. Its spiral horns and striped sides are gone in a bluish flash.

-- A Masai villager gives me -- well, sells me -- his cowhide shield. He says it once repelled an angry lion during a hunt. Are those really the clawmarks of the king of beasts? Lions regularly munch on Masai ... and since I'm now known as Masai Mike, that's a bit of drama I'd rather skip.