Far to the west, the Rio Grande comes splashing down out of the Chilean Andes to begin its long, meandering descent across the wide pampas of central Tierra del Fuego before spilling into the Atlantic. It is, to the untrained eye, not an especially enticing river – the savage and often unrelenting winds that whistle across the wide, flat plains prevent anything much from growing to any great height, and the river banks are bleak and almost entirely devoid of trees.
