Bosnia’s star city, Mostar

“Are you 1,000 percent certain I’m not about to die?” I asked, eyeing my taxi driver with suspicion.

“One million percent,” Zoran confirmed, nodding.

Gallery

Vote for your favorite European travel destination: What European cities have the most to offer travelers? Vote for your favorite vacation spot.

More on this Story

• Taking it slow on the Croatian island of Vis
• Bosnia’s star city, Mostar
• How to really see the Amalfi Coast? Walk it.
• Gathering 2013, a celebration with a kiss of the Irish

View all Items in this Story

• Vote for your favorite European travel destination
• European destinations: Italy’s coast, Bosnia and Croatia

We had just driven 30 minutes from the Bosnian town of Mostar to Kravica Waterfalls, one of Europe’s most stunning natural sights. Zoran was insisting that I take a dip in the falls, even though the water is frigid almost all year-round. I was worried about the temperature. But I was even more worried about the snakes.

“No problem with the snakes,” Zoran said. “They swim, you swim. No problem.”

Details: Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

I imagined my fiance’s voice in my head: “Don’t swim with snakes, Jilly,” he cautioned. (He’s always saying things like that.) But David wasn’t there. Zoran was. And Zoran was “1 million percent” certain that the terrifying snakes he said were in the waterfalls were in fact totally harmless.

The moment perfectly encapsulated Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country that defies every expectation. I’d come to Bosnia to write about its burgeoning travel industry from a millennial perspective — that is, as someone who was too young in the mid-1990s to remember the war. Untainted by any memories of conflict, I thought that I could see Bosnia as a blank slate.

But Bosnia is no one’s blank slate. The war may have ended 17 years ago, but it’s still everywhere: in the bombed-out shells of buildings, in bullet-riddled walls and in the seemingly endless cemeteries. At the same time, those war remnants are mixed with equally endless moments of perfect beauty: sky-scraping mountains, charming villages and gorgeous multiethnic architecture.

Within minutes of leaving the Sarajevo airport, I realized that I needed a new plan. Bosnia demanded it.

A geopolitical puzzle

During the bus ride to Mostar, a small medieval town in northern Herzegovina, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the scenery outside my window. In the United States, the dramatic green peaks would be a national park. In Bosnia, they felt like a fairy tale thrust into brutal reality. Small, colorful homes clustered at the base of green mountains, and as dusk approached, an ethereal layer of fog gathered to mask the bullet holes that pockmark most of the houses. It was haunting and magnificent.

Nighttime bus rides in foreign countries are good times for introspection, and I started to hate myself just a bit for how little I knew about what had happened to the Balkans. I briefly studied the conflict in high school, of course, but who can really understand it? Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats, Bosnia’s three ethnic groups, were all Yugoslavs — until suddenly they weren’t. They coexisted peacefully, even happily — until suddenly they didn’t.

“Can you explain it to me?” I asked Suzana, the woman sitting next to me on the bus. “I don’t understand.”

She shook her head sadly. “We don’t understand it, either,” she said. I’d hear the same sentiment a dozen times during my trip.

The country’s contemporary geographic and political landscape is no less confusing. Bosnia and Herzegovina? What exactly is Herzegovina? (It’s a historical triangle in the southern half of the country.) The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska? What? (They’re the country’s two political sub-regions; the 51 percent section of Bosniaks and Croats elects two presidents, while the 49 percent section of Serbs elects one president.)