Travel: Ten Years After - How The World Has Changed

TEN YEARS ago this week, possibly the worst-timed guidebook ever was published. The Travellers Survival Kit: Soviet Union and Eastern Europe arrived on the bookshelves along with Hungary's announcement that it would no longer patrol its stretch of the Iron Curtain.

Faced with an unstoppable exodus to the West within six months, every Communist government from Berlin to Bucharest had tumbled. Much of the information in the book become amusingly redundant, such as the advice on flights to Berlin: "The best bargains of all are on the scheduled services of Pan Am" (which rapidly followed the German Democratic Republic into oblivion).

Some of the political predictions were wide of the mark, such as: "There is no immediate end in sight to the Ceausescu dynasty" (by Christmas, the Romanian president and his wife had been summarily executed), and: "It is highly unlikely the city of Leningrad will ever return to its original name of St Petersburg."

Some things remain the same, though. Boris Yeltsin became the first elected president of Russia eight years ago, opening up the country for Western investors - but not to tourists. You still face a bureaucratic battle to procure a visa to Moscow and Leningrad - sorry, St Petersburg. And hotel dining is rarely joyful: "Visitors on package holidays will get used to filing into the hotel's restaurant at the dinner hour and having three or four courses presented unceremoniously in quick succession."

I know the author is feeling foolish, and on next Monday's Travel Show on BBC2, I return to East Germany 10 years after my book came out. Luckily, the old rule: "It is not possible to enter the GDR on a bicycle" has been repealed.