My boss spent 20+ years in Papua New Guinea and worked for a telco for a while. PNG is a Pacific island due north of Australia. It's a beautiful, tropical paradise that was fought over by various imperial powers and finally became an independent nation in 1975. The tribal cultures are protected by its constitution and only 15% of people live in the cities. Not sure about resources but it's location at the Australian end of Oceania (with SE Asia at the other end), makes it very important for commerce.

My boss has regaled us with many stories of the shenanigans that happen here as a result of interaction between traditional cultures and modern commerce. Just yesterday we were talking about about some of these issues.

• He said that major communications lines go from AU to PNG to Guam then on to the US. It's 300-500km from the south side of the island to the north side so the logical way would be to bring the cable in from the south, run it overland to the north then back undersea on its way to Guam. Only one small problem... the land owners quite reasonably demand compensation for clearances and have demonstrated that they're quite happy remove infrastructure that gets placed without consent AND much of the territory is contested at a local level which means even if an agreement was reached with one group, another would come along and cut things up. It was actually cheaper and safer to run a chain of undersea cables from south to north around the coastline, touching in at various locations along the way.

• Some time in the 90s he was once called to investigate why a cell tower on a mountain top appeared offline. If you google "PNG highlands" you'll see some utterly gorgeous landscape and understand the difficulty of maintaining high tech infrastructure in the region. There are no roads these locations; everything needs to be done by helicopter.

So Bob takes a whirlybird on a one hour flight. They had great difficulty finding the location. You'd think it was hard to miss a cell tower, particularly when you have GPS. Then they discovered the reason. There was no tower, just a concrete pad.

Of course there was no cell signal, what with there being no tower, so all he could do was snap a few photos and tell the pilot to head back. When he called in with the news, his boss unleashed a stream of profanity to make a sailor blush. Bob learned that this was the third tower in a 50km radius to simply disappear. In each case, despite the lack of roads, thieves had made off with an entire tower, two diesel generators, the control box and the fuel shed!