Canberra: Sydney's international airport came alive with tears, embraces and laughter on Monday as Australia opened its border for the first time in 20 months, with some arriving travellers removing mandatory masks to see the faces of loved ones they've been separated from for so long.
Just being able to come home without having to go to quarantine is huge, Carly Boyd, a passenger who travelled from New York, told reporters at Sydney's Kingsford-Smith Airport, where Peter Allen's unofficial national anthem I Still Call Australia Home was playing.
There's a lot of people on that flight who have loved ones who are about to die or have people who died this week. So for them to be able to get off the plane and go see them straight away is pretty amazing, Boyd added. Countries in the Asia-Pacific have had some of the world's strictest COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures and travel restrictions, but with vaccination rates rising and cases falling, many are now starting to cautiously reopen.
Some, like China and Japan, remain essentially sealed-off to foreign visitors but Thailand also started to substantially reopen Monday and many others have also already started, or plan to follow suit.
Tourism accounted for some 20% of Thailand's economy before the pandemic, and the lockdown has caused massive job losses and hardship.
Still, only a few months removed from a surge fueled by the delta variant of the virus that saw deaths rise dramatically, many Thais remain worried that an influx of outsiders could trigger new outbreaks.
Bangkok taxi driver Issarapong Paingam lost his mother to COVID-19 during the recent surge, and said it would make more sense to him for the government to focus its attention fully on reopening domestically before introducing foreign travelers into the mix.