Gold Exploration in West Africa

[FL]

Trading Fool asked:
>FL, What were you doing wandering around rural
> Ghana if you don't mind me asking?

I was mainly a tourist. I had a fun three weeks traveling around southern and central Ghana. I highly recommend it if you want to see something totally different with safety, some comfort, and very friendly English-speaking people. (Just avoid the muslim far North, which I consider unsafe.)

I did get a tour of the Bonte placer gold mine run by Akrokeri-Ashanti Gold (AKR.TO) near Kumasi, which was very interesting. I took the overnight ferry up Lake Volta. When I visited the hippopotami (hippopotamuses) in Bui National Park, which was my favorite thing to do in Ghana, I stayed on Birim Gold's (BGI.TO) Bui concession. I saw some striking sheets and veins of white quartz in strange rocks, but I'm too geologically ignorant to know what I was looking at. At Bui, Bonte, and the beaches of Axim, I looked for large gold nuggets lying around on the ground but saw none.

I was in Accra and Kumasi in addition to rural areas. I watched the action on the Ghana Stock Exchange floor from the public gallery. The brokers walk among stock-specific whiteboards making bids and asks, socializing and making deals, while big-shot investors sometimes shout coded buy and sell signals down to their brokers.

Also looked into the white, American king of Axim in Ghana, mentioned at
http://www.kingdomofbiffeche.com , which is an odd phenomenon. Axim is picturesque with lovely beaches, an ancient seaside castle, islands with palms, etc. in addition to being the south end of the Ashanti gold belt.

>Why don't you post your calculations?
>Then someone could check them rather
>than starting from scratch.

Sorry, I didn't keep them after I bought Champion (CHA.TO) to get into Red Back. I translated the total valuations from Australian and Canadian dollars into US dollars, which I now realize was a needless calculation, since US dollars aren't involved at all. The key is the Red Back/Champion share ratio in the merger announcement. That and the current share prices, fully diluted shares outstanding, and the Australian/Canadian currency ratio. I guess you should also consider any possibility that the merger might fail to take place. Champion's phosphate property in Guinea-Bissau just seemed like a bit of possible lagniappe.

>Any thoughts on why AKR is down to .04
> after trading up to .13 recently??

No, except maybe hitting some lower ore grades; what baffles me is why Akrokeri-Ashanti (AKR.TO) shares suddenly quadrupled in the first place. I had limit orders to pick up shares cheaply during the company's time of distress (credit crunch and muddy rainy season) which I did to some degree. I figured that the company's creditors would gain nothing from being mean and repossessing a bunch of specialized equipment they have no use for. They'd benefit much more from a recovered and prosperous company. On my tour of the Bonte mine the operation looked good to me; orderly and professional. A lot depends on what grade of placer ore they happen to hit in a particular month. They have a unique technology for concentrating the gold from the mud and gravel. It's all gold metal flakes and dust, which I like because there's no environmentally damaging chemical treatments. I couldn't figure out what's going on at their other property, Goldenrae, but the whole time I was around, the president Mike Cawood was doing something over at Goldenrae so I didn't meet him. I consider Akrokeri-Ashanti precarious now, but quite lucrative at these prices if it survives.

FL