It is really amazing to see how many people think that the travel expenses are too high.

The same for the results of the promotional tours. From experience, I know that it doesn't just take a flight, to do a promo in a different country, or even within North America. There are a lot of costs involved that are not visible to the generally un-trained eye.

Any product or company promotion requires a lot of time and money for it to become known in the appropriate circles.

The initial start up of promoting is always the most costly. "You have to spend money to make money". What do you think it costs to have a hospitality suite in the Royal York Hotel or any other prestigiuos hotel?

Most likely there was not only one guy flying to Peru at a time. I would expect to have a team of 2 or more to go down there to organize the activities, deal with the local goverments, etc.

So unless one has been in this type of business, one can't possibly have a realistic opinion of the validity of the travel expenses.

I know I sound naive, but I have been around for a long time, and I have travelled on business a lot. It also has not become obvious, what benefit all that travelling has brought to SLI, but I have to trust Management enough, that they did, what they thought best, to move the image of the company ahead, even if it wasn't always obvious immediately.

Just my take on this whole travel expense issue, and I know that I'll not make a lot of friends with it, but this is how I see it and to make a huge production of it makes no sense.

Btw. I would imagine that a lot of the exploration bills, for the trenching and drilling did not even come in, before the financials were put together, so the numbers shown may not reflect reality as far as exploration expenses are concerned. No point to compare.

Real