Luanda sits above a half moon-shaped bay fringed with palm trees. A finger of sandy road snakes round, shielding the harbour from the Atlantic where the waves pound blue or grey throughout the year. Along the road are fish sellers, restaurants and bars which are full every night. From October to May Luanda's more fortunate residents crowd the beaches of "The Island" every weekend and at lunchtime.
Tourists with deep pockets can do even better and join the nomenklatura on beautiful unspoilt Mussulo island, a 20-minute speed boat ride away down the coast. A small, enterprising tourist industry has grown up with the influx of foreigners working with the UN in Luanda since the failed elections of 1992. They will usually pay well to be whisked out of the capital so they can forget it for day.
Apart from those staying in a five-star hotel with swimming pool, constant internet access, and powerful generators, most foreigners loathe Luanda. It suffers perennially from water and electricity cuts; limbless ex-soldiers beg at every crossroads; tribes of street children have established small roadside industries selling matches, cigarettes, soap and a strange variety of cheap household goods from China. The colonies of oversized mice are inescapable.
But Luanda is seductive too. Besides the sudden dazzling sunset over the Atlantic every night, the mysterious shapes of massive baobad trees and the colours and scents of tropical bushes, nowhere else in the world offers such perpetually fascinating lessons in ingenuity, such warmth, generosity, birthday parties.
And outside Luanda there is the stunning beauty of the Angolan interior, the rainforests, the hosts of white butterflies over the rivers, the spectacular waterfalls of Calendula, the heart-stopping sadness of the ruined Portuguese provincial towns eaten by tropical foliage and riddled with shellfire.
But these days you have to use your imagination or rely on your memories to see these things: Unita armed gangs move freely through the country, making it difficult for even the phlegmatic visitor to get far. Nearly 30 years on from independence, Unita, once a proxy for the CIA and apartheid South Africa, can still shoot down UN planes or attack civilian targets: they recently ambushed a train and killed 250 people.
Angola is not for the escapist, unless you are escaping the emptiness of materialist consumer society. It is, writ large, a political lesson in what the cold war did to the third world and, in human terms, a lesson in surviving with your humanity intact.