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Peru’s best-known tourist site, Machu Picchu, opened its doors after months of coronavirus closure, but only for one visitor: a Japanese man stranded in the country by the pandemic.
“The first person on Earth to go to Machu Picchu since the confinement is meeeeeee,” Jesse Katayama posted on his Instagram account along with photos of himself at the deserted site.
“This is really amazing! Thank you,” he added in a video posted on the Facebook pages of the local tourism authority in Cusco, where the famous site is located.
Katayama spoke against the backdrop of the majestic mountaintop dotted with ancient ruins that once drew thousands of tourists a day but has been closed since March due to the coronavirus.
The Japanese boxing instructor, identified by local media as a 26-year-old from Nara, has been trapped in Peru since March, when he bought a ticket to the tourist site just days before the country declared a health emergency.
He told a Peruvian newspaper that he had only planned to spend three days in the area, but with flights canceled and movement limited by the virus, he found himself trapped there for months.
Eventually, his plight reached the local tourism authority, which agreed to give him a special permit to visit the Inca city, reopening the site just for him.
“I thought I couldn’t 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 most enduring legacy of the Inca empire that ruled a large swath of western South America for 100 years prior to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.
The ruins of the Inca settlement were rediscovered in 1911 by the American explorer Hiram Bingham, and in 1983, UNESCO declared Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site.
It was originally scheduled to reopen to visitors in July, but has now been delayed until November.
Only 675 tourists a day will be allowed in, 30 percent of the number allowed before the pandemic, and visitors are expected to maintain social distancing.
Since it first opened to tourists in 1948, it has been closed only once before, for two months in 2010, when a flood destroyed the train tracks that connected it to Cusco.
burs-hih-sah / am / jah
