I’ve spent much of my life first 17 years of life dreaming about the boulevards of Provence and street cafes of Paris. I ended up instead as an exchange student in industrial town in the coal and steel region of in Lorraine, France. But that didn’t daunt my love of travel.

Driving through the mountains of Bosnia, it’s easy to become enchanted by the verdant beauty of this little visited Balkan country. It’s also easy to forget it’s one of Europe’s poorest countries, and that through the 1990’s, it was torn by the worst ethnic warfare Europe has seen since the Second World War.