Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these are the countries you can visit

If you’re under 30, brace yourself. The newspapers are about to be full of endless (ie quite long) articles about all the changes that happened in Europe at the end of 1989.

But they’ll ignore one aspect of the changes that happened when the Soviet Union’s satellite states rebelled. Suddenly, half of Europe and quite a lot of Asia opened up to travellers.

Before 1989, if you wanted to go to Prague, Tashkent or Vilnius you were either very intrepid or a spy.

So what came first: easyJet or stag parties in Tallinn? Hard to know. But there’s no question that an aviation revolution soon followed the political one of 1989. Today, the choice between a weekend in Brussels or Budapest is a question of taste (waffles or noodles?) rather than deep-seated ideology.

But it wasn’t just in Europe that change – and change, overwhelmingly, for the better – was rampant. This really was A Good Year: the year the world opened up. Shame about the terrible fashions. Freedom arrived in shoulder pads, big hair and batwing sleeves. Listicles didn’t exist then, either. Truly, the world is a much better place now.

Here’s my listicle: countries that were “closed” in 1989 but are “open” now.

Why the quote marks? This isn’t an exact science. My definition of an open country is 1) getting a visa is straightforward, 2) the destination has a tourism industry that’s interested in attracting overseas visitors, 3) you’re not likely to be followed around by secret police and 4) there’s not a war going on.

In eastern Europe we’ve got Poland, the former East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

Then there are the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The big, bad daddy of The Russian Federation (in 1989, the USSR).

You can now visit all across Soviet Asia, to Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan – which, from 1 February, offered visa-free travel for residents of 45 countries, including the UK – Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

Mongolia wasn’t officially part of the USSR, but it might as well have been: it too had its revolution in 1990.

And as we’re heading into Asia, let’s not forget that the global battle between communism and capitalism had, arguably, an even greater effect on more people there – and in 1989, more of that continent was in a sorry, and in some cases, horrific state of isolation.

South Korea had shown Europe the way towards freedom with its own revolution in 1987. We’re still waiting for its northern neighbour and may for a while yet. You could go to Japan in 1989, of course – if you could afford it.

Otherwise, China had begun to dismantle Maoism. But this was the year of Tiananmen Square. Perhaps the least expected consequence of that brutality would be the Communist Party’s policy of allowing an unprecedented number of its citizens out and others in.

As for countries in China’s sphere of influence: Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos might as well have been on Mars for all the chance you had to go there and wear harem pants and get a Buddha tattoo. But 1989 was a landmark year here too: peace between Cambodia and Vietnam was finally reached and Cambodians were allowed to practise Buddhism and own private property.

Closed Burma is now open Myanmar, even if the hopes the new wave of travellers had for that country have been sullied by the Rohingya genocide. Ending totalitarianism and military rule is rarely a case of black hats today, white hats tomorrow.

Hence the debate about Saudi Arabia’s recent decision to welcome foreigners. In 1989, it was a decade into a policy of being the most conservative – that is, repressive and closed-off – theocratic Muslim state. In Iran, the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 and the election of Rafsanjani certainly made the climate more benign for western tourists.

Oman would open up to great success in the 1990s. High in the Himalayas, Bhutan would follow the same strategy of inviting in wealthy westerners.

As for Lebanon, the civil war had been raging on and on since the mid-Seventies. But – this really was a year of miracles – 1989 brought peace. Journalists who once were kidnapped and chained to walls are now wined, dined and cultivated.

Africa? This was the year FW De Klerk became president of South Africa: the end of apartheid was nigh and with it the chance to travel not just to that beautiful country but also Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia. Angola’s civil war would drag on until the next century. But that country is open too.

And last to South America. Nicaragua, Panama and Colombia were all out of bounds as civil wars and invasions continued. You would have struggled in Cuba in 1989 – its tourist boom was yet to come. But there were free elections in Brazil and Paraguay: the continent was coming within reach of the ordinary traveller.

Some countries were troubled then and are still: Afghanistan, North Korea. Iraq and Syria have gone from problematic to life-threatening. Sublime, sad Kashmir – not a country, but a place every avid traveller dreams of visiting – is once again off-limits.

Venezuela was tough in 1989 and is a whole lot tougher now.

But open the atlas: the world today is a better and infinitely more accessible place, and that has a lot to do with the events of 1989.

And we can’t leave 1989 without one other landmark act that would make a huge difference to thousands of Britons. This was the year Iceland legalised beer drinking.

Yet for all the political and geographical changes, there were things happening that only a few academics and military planners knew about: things that would have even bigger implications for the future of travel.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for something called the commercial internet. And the first GPS satellites were launched. The world was about to become a lot smaller, more familiar and more accessible, wherever you were.