It’s 3am in New Orleans. In exactly one week’s time, Katrina will ravage this place. Life here is nocturnal. There’s little to entice you away from the air-conditioned comfort of the Holiday Inn amidst the belting heat of hurricane season. So you step out as daylight dwindles, and you stroll back in as the sun creeps up.

So there we were, 3am, on our way home from an evening on the other side of town, trying to escape the brutally tourist-oriented French Quarter, beyond which few wander. It’s a city mesmerizing and vulgar all at once. There’s a life and buzz which lasts well into the night. But step a block out of Lonely Planet proscribed lines and you’re in trouble.

You’re amidst shady characters, depravity and poverty, the like of which you thought belonged in another world. We’d ventured there once during a rare trip into daylight hours. We’d wanted to explore those infamous New Orleans cemeteries, where they intern the bodies above ground because the city lies so prone to flooding.

Houses seem decrepit out here, shady characters line street corners, and a beasting, hooded hulk of a man appears to be following us. We go into a petrol station to lose him. We don’t. He wanders in and asks for money. You don’t mess with him. You’re in another world, and you give the man some money. That was another day, and we hot-stepped it back to the sheltered safety of the French Quarter.

Back to the night, 3am, on our way home. There are three of us. I’m strolling a fair way ahead, on my own, oblivious to the dark character, homeless, leaning ragged against a wall on a street half a mile away from our hotel.

He comes to life – ‘Hey’. ‘Hey’, I reply, knowing not what else to do. He pulls a gun. I’ve never seen a gun before. It’s the middle of the night thousands of miles from home. There’s five dollars left in my wallet. Gun or no gun, chances are those five dollars will be in his pocket before this night is out. And so they were.

He offers to shake my hand, as if we’d just done business; which, I guess, we had. I shake his, and move on, back towards the Holiday Inn that will, a few days later, become home to so many of the media throng who descend upon New Orleans to cover the destruction wrought upon the city by Katrina’s floods.

I don’t know what became of the characters we came across. But I know that Katrina devastated the lives of the homeless, the poor, and those who didn’t live where the levees had held. Instead, she destroyed the likes of that man who pulled the gun, or the fellow from the petrol station by the cemetery. She broke those who, in America, were left with nothing to do but use a gun to make a living in the middle of the night.