Cash cows or white elephants? Only time will tell with these ambitious tourism projects

Tourism initiatives and infrastruc­ture projects can turn out to be strokes of genius, or costly white elephants. Some of the unlikeliest brain­waves have been huge hits: who could have guessed that dressing people up in radiation suits and sending them off to explore Chernobyl would prove such a success? Or that opening up Tuol Sleng, the Cambodian secondary school used by the Khmer Rouge regime as a torture and execution centre, would draw tourists in their hundreds of thousands?

Only time…