Peru’s best-known tourist site, Machu Picchu, opened its doors after months of the last coronavirus, but for a guest: a Japanese trapped in the country through the pandemic.
“The first user on Earth that has been to Machu Picchu since the closure is meeeeeee,” Jesse Katayama posted on his Instagram account along with photos of himself on the abandoned site.
“It’s unbelievable! Thank you,” he added in a video posted on the Facebook pages of the local tourism authority of Cusco, where the aforementioned site is located.
Katayama spoke in the context of the majestic mountaintop dotted with ancient ruins that once attracted thousands of tourists a day that has been closed since March due to the coronavirus.
The Japanese boxing instructor, known through local media as a 26-year-old from Nara, has been stranded in Peru since March when he bought a price ticket from the tourist a few days before the country declared a physical emergency.
He told a Peruvian newspaper that he had only planned to spend three days in the area, but with flights cancelled and limited by the virus, he found himself trapped there for months.
Machu Picchu has reopened for a lucky visitor, a Japanese man stranded in the country by the pandemic Photo: AFP / Percy HURTADO
Eventually, his destination reached the local tourism authority, which agreed to give the Inca city a special permit, reopening the site just for him.
“I don’t think I could go, but thanks to all of you who pleaded with the mayor and the government, I had this super special opportunity,” he wrote in Japanese on his Instagram account.
Machu Picchu is the enduring ultimate legacy of the Inca Empire that ruled much of western South America for a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.
The ruins of the Inca colony were rediscovered in 1911 through the American explorer Hiram Bingham, and in 1983, UNESCO declared Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site.
He originally planned to reopen visitors in July, but has now been delayed until November.
Only 675 tourists will be allowed to enter according to the day, 30% of the number allowed before the pandemic, with visitors at their social distance.
Since it opened to tourists in 1948, it has been closed once before, for two months in 2010, when a flood destroyed the railway lines connecting it to Cusco.