The road from Melbourne takes you through many miles of these hushed, charred sentinels before you come across the town itself.
This is serious food: beef cheeks braised with orange zest and star anise; caramelised chicory, Picos Blue and walnuts; sea bass with puy lentils and charred leeks; A1 charcuterie boards, but served in super-laidback circs.
Sitting under a young mango tree alongside the charred remains of her school, the headteacher looks around nervously.
"The ballots were delivered in the dead of night, and we weren't told they were coming until the last minute," said Sergei Pashkovsky, the head of the electoral committee at polling station 239, opposite the charred shell of the regional administration, set on fire during clashes this month.
"I refuse to believe that my friends were in those graves," he said, wincing at the thought of the charred remains retrieved so far, which have yet to be identified.
Residents who rushed to the scene found only charred bodies, they said.
She had been mutilated, dismembered and charred beyond identification.
You can turn the heat down to medium on the griddle after all are well charred – don't worry about black bits, they add flavour.
One body was entirely charred.
The sauce is light and winey rather than gloopy and canned, the scallions are fat and lightly charred from the wok, the ginger comes in appreciable threads.A crispy garlic chicken, served on the bone and hacked into bite-size pieces with a cleaver, offers a similarly robust economy of flavour: just garlic and good-quality chicken.
So far, the fires have charred an area of 1.65m hectares.See article: The west, ablazeAs part of a tour of Middle Eastern OPEC members, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, visited Iraq and was due to meet its president, Saddam Hussein.
