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

It was the year that modern travel began: Mark Jones has the post-Berlin Wall bucket list

Vilnius: the capital of Lithuania was open to visit after 1989 (istock)

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.