The pilot did a corkscrew descent circling over the city twice in a bid to lose altitude on his approach to Luanda International Airport. This gave me plenty of time to view the city below. From containerships and oil tankers in the bay to shantytowns and new industrial parks under construction at the edge of the city to its center with shiny office buildings, I had the perfect view of Luanda, the city whose nickname before the Angolan civil war was "the Rio de Janeiro of Africa."