After the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 Arnold was able to travel to many mountain regions around the world. During the Cold War era, he was only in a few exceptional cases allowed to pursue climbing and mountaineering outside the Eastern Bloc. Nevertheless, he became close friends with West German climbers Kurt Albert and Wolfgang Güllich, who visited the Saxon Switzerland in the early 1980s and managed to repeat some of Arnold's hardest routes. With Kurt Albert he later undertook expeditions to Patagonia and the Karakorum.