Finding Joaquin

Carlos and I arrive in Gobenador Gregores, Argentina, approximately 99 degrees of latitude south of Vancouver (in 2017). Coco meets us at the restaurant while we are having dinner and tells us a driver will be there in the morning to take us to our newly acquired Joaquin project. So in the morning we are driving to Joaquin and just at the edge of the tiny sphere of cellphone coverage centred at Gobenador Gregores, as we head into the vast endless region of no cell coverage, the driver turns to us and asks how to get to Joaquin. What. Dude, you're the driver, we just stepped off the boat. Everyone checks their memory again, no, none of us has been there before.

I ask Carlos, sitting in the back seat, to call Coco for directions. He says on it. The driver starts fumbling around on the radio screen for his non existent on board GPS, which even if it did exist, would be totally useless for finding some sheds and drill core boxes stacked in the bushes. I actually do have some GPS coordinates but that doesn't help since he has a digital radio display, not a GPS. Totally different things. A short while later Carlos starts issuing directions, x kilometres on this road and y kilometres on that road.

Okay, off we go. We start measuring kilometres when we get to the second road. We pass Mina Martha. Later I see drill holes and cleared lines and soon enough see a large building with a red roof. Yay, the mini mart, we're here. I've snooped all this on google earth just last week so I know what this shit looks like. But the driver keeps going. I say aren't we here? They say no.

After around 40 minutes Carlos and the driver are making noises that sound like we're lost. I say yah, we passed it back there. They say how do I know, I explain google earth, but if Coco says it's y kilometres down this road then maybe I'm wrong. Carlos says oh, he wasn't able to reach Coco, he had no cell coverage. Wtf? I ask him on which authority was he issuing forth with directions a while back? He says he was reading from an old report on his laptop. What the heck. We could have gone back and telephoned Coco back when we were near comms.

Too late for being sensible now, we agree to continue in the Coco/old report direction for a while and if we don't find it we'll turn back to the red mini mart. We don't find it. The driver comments that people could be a little more explicit with the directions. I know! We head back to the red mini mart.

After a while I get to thinking, hang on, that red mini mart was a freaken totally different place I was snooping, not Joaquin. Or was it? We were snooping the google earth for a while cos we were scooping two different projects in this same area at around the same time, and now I'm confused, but how many red mini marts can there really be out here? Cos there's really nothing out here. Should I say something? I decide to keep my mouth shut. We get to the red mini mart and it's not a mini mart but a big shed with a red roof and there's no one there and that's not the project. Danggit.

I want to use my laptop to look for a map, but to make matters worse, I brought the wrong power adapter with me and used my unplugged lap top last night and now I have like 45 seconds worth of battery life. I can't find a decent map but manage to take a snap shot with my cell phone of the project location details in a technical report, right as the battery dies. Fortunately, it's one of those +300 page reports with every possible detail including comprehensive directions to the project, from the guy's driveway in Arizona down to the name of the estancia the road is on. We manage to find the project after continuing on maybe 15 minutes more from where we turned back last time. Ha. Here's a photo of the project, it's beautiful. The next year we went back, same driver, and he knew how to get there.