There is nothing at Kinshasa International Airport beyond the bare walls and massive iron gates. It was looted in 1991 and has never been repaired. The reception of foreigners is hostile, even intimidating. Passports are commandeered for half an hour, you have to compete to get your luggage and then succumb to a cold interrogation about what you are doing there, where you are coming from, the purpose of the visit. And that's the good part.
Outside I was met by a posse of helpers, some wearing security uniforms. They were all demanding dollars for their unspecified services. I was hurtled towards a car, designated a taxi, and had to struggle to allow just the driver and one helper accompany me into the city. There then followed an unnerving drive to what I hoped was the city centre.
First impressions were of the many people walking along the sides of the highway leading into Kinshasa or at makeshift markets. Thousands and thousands of people, a few on bicycles, many packed into trucks.
But mostly people simply walking along the roadside. The men were empty-handed and many women had large bundles on their heads, some carrying a child.
The taxi, like almost all the cars in Kinshasa, could have qualified for a 1976 scrappage scheme. The doors were held in place with bits of wire, the windows were permanently down, permanently up or half up. The windscreen of almost every car was shattered in part, shattered entirely or non-existent.
Many of the buildings seemed either burnt out, looted or abandoned halfway through construction.
And everywhere a car repairs and spare parts industry, especially in fifth-, sixth- and seventh-hand tyres. There were cars propped up on blocks, with people underneath and others looking on.
And then to the Intercontinental Hotel.
It might as well have been in Florida or southern California - the air-conditioned luxury, the sumptuous pool, the plush restaurants, the sleek shopping malls and the plush rooms.
There were a few Belgian (I think) businessmen around the hotel. Also there were some UN officials who arrived to bring peace to the Congo and many well turned-out Zimbabwean army officers (Sandhurst graduates to a man). Angolan and Namibian officers were also there to bring something else to the Congo. (These foreign soldiers contrasted with their Congolese colleagues who were mainly a rag-tag assembly of youngsters, often with no laces in their boots).
There is only one other hotel in which Westerners and Sandhurst graduates stay when in Kinshasa, the Belgian Merlin Hotel. It and the Intercontinental Hotel are very expensive - it costs several hundred pounds to stay for a day, and the staff are unabashed about it.
Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), is on the Congo river, some 350 miles from the sea. Right across the river you can see its sister city, Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo.
There is also a war going on in that Congo; fighting has been taking place in Brazzaville in the last few weeks as evidenced by palls of smoke which can be seen from Kinshasa.
Along the river on the Kinshasa side there are magnificent residences, dating from the Belgian colonial period. Many of these are now embassies.
In one of the few wealthier suburbs is the palace of the former dictator, Mobutu. It is enclosed in a vast area, encompassing a self-contained city where his presidential guard resided. Apart from the massive gold palace the enclosure included a personal zoo.
It was just one of four palaces which Mobutu had built for himself in the Congo when he personally looted for himself and his cronies billions and billions of dollars from the vast riches of that country. He had an estimated $5 billion in foreign banks when he was deposed two years ago.
The Kinshasa palace is now looted, and Mobutu's presidential guard slaughtered the animals of the zoo to feed themselves in the last days of his reign.
Nearby is another palace, that of the new President, Kabila. Along the main boulevard, Boulevard du 30 Juin, there are other beautiful colonial buildings, and towards what is called the city centre there are some 20 high-rise office and apartment buildings. Near the boulevard there are government buildings around the Palais des Nations. Apart from that Kinshasa is a catastrophe.
It is estimated that eight million people live in the city, nearly all in township hovels. Sanitation, where it exists, means open sewers. Only a fraction of the population has access to clean water. Life expectancy at birth has declined in the past decade, now at 47 years.
On the first night in Kinshasa, I got a taxi to what a guidebook said was a bar area, Matonge, in the area known as Le Cite. Along most of the way there was no electricity; street stalls were lit by oil lamps. The road became a dirt track and then hardly a road at all.
Along the Avenue de la Victorie, the bar district, there were shacks, a few of them lit with electric light, with taped blaring music. I stopped at one of these bars and had a large bottle of beer for $1 and got into conversation with some locals, some of whom worked for the Kabila administration.
They explained how devastated the country was; devastated by the Belgians, then even more devastated by Mobutu, who was supported by the Belgians, the French and the Americans during the Cold War.
The scale of Mobutu's legacy is perhaps best encapsulated by the statistic that when the Congo became independent in 1960 there were over 100,000 miles of paved roads in the country; now there are fewer than 10,000.
Mobutu was overthrown in 1997 and Kabila was installed with the help of the Rwandans and the Angolans. In August last year, a new civil war began. This was to oust Kabila yet quickly became Africa's first continental war involving nine nations. A peace agreement was signed in July, providing for UN monitors.
The world community has been unable to supply even 50 monitors to police a peace in this vast region (over 2.3 million square kilometres). Yet it could take more than two million slaves from the area during the Atlantic slave trade.
The world community also saw millions of natives murdered during the early Belgian colonial period, in what was the first holocaust of the 20th century, and helped loot the country of its vast wealth in the fight against communism.