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Background
Landscape and scenery
The scenery in Bosnia is little short of epic. The country appears to be end-to-end filled with snow-capped mountains, forests and lakes. This is perhaps not perfect for fans of wide open plains, but most people cannot help but be impressed by what is on offer.
Government
The Dayton Accord, which finally settled the war in Bosnia in the mid-nineties, created a government which was a loose federation between the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Republika Srpska. In reality loose is quite an understatement to describe this federation - the two regions even have separate railway companies. Whilst glacial progress is made in melding the governments of the two regions into a more unified entity, the EU continues to have a significant role in banging heads together and making things work smoothly. From the point of view of the traveller things work pretty much as they do anywhere else, with international institutions and conventions respected, reasonably effective local policing and a working currency and banking system. It is difficult to completely ignore the presence of international troops and widespread presence of EU and UN institution though.
Culture and religious attitudes
Bosnia is historically an extremely tolerant country. In the middle ages a large Jewish population grew up in Sarajevo composed of Sephadic jews expelled from Spain. In later times the Bosniak population (who are moderate Muslims) have lived happily with jews and christians of Serbian and Croatian ethnicity alike. Whilst the war has to some extent destroyed this, leaving a defensive and ethnically-monotonous Serbian state, the remainder of the country is broadly welcoming to anybody who respects their right to exist as a nation. Either way there is a feeling that the hatred and destruction of the war was more a temporary aberration from the normal friendliness of the area than a sea-change in peoples' attitudes