Peru reopens Machu Picchu for a Japanese tourist who waited for seven months

Seven months later, his patience has paid off.

Over the weekend, the Peruvian government reopened Machu Picchu just for Katayama, giving him a one-of-a-kind opportunity to see the ruins with no one else around except for the director of the site and photographers accompanying him.

Photos posted on Katayama’s Instagram account showed him standing amid the iconic site, backed by a sweeping Andean vista.

“The first person on Earth who went to Machu Picchu since the lockdown is meeeeeee,” Katayama wrote on Instagram on Sunday, adding the hashtag “Mission Impossible.”

“He’d come to Peru with the dream of getting in,” Peruvian Culture Minister Alejandro Neyra said at a Monday news conference, according to the Financial Times.

Around 200 Japanese citizens became stuck in Peru when the pandemic disrupted global travel in March. Many of them were flown out on repatriation flights in the following weeks, but Katayama told CNN Travel that he decided to stay in Aguas Calientes.

He rented a room, explored lesser-known sites in the area and began teaching boxing lessons to local children. But his hopes of getting to visit Machu Picchu dwindled as his savings started to run low and plans to reopen the site were delayed.

Sympathetic locals who had met Katayama and learned of his plight lobbied on his behalf, and Peru’s Ministry of Culture eventually agreed to make an exception, ahead of Katayama’s scheduled departure from Peru this month.

“This is so amazing!” he said in a video recorded from the mountaintop and published by local authorities, according to Reuters. “Thank you!”

Machu Picchu’s initial reopening date in July was delayed, as a spike in novel coronavirus cases saw Peru become the nation with the world’s highest number of coronavirus deaths per capita. The country of 32 million has recorded more than 850,000 cases and 33,350 deaths.

The site is expected to begin admitting visitors at reduced capacity at some point next month, as the country opens gradually to foreign travelers amid a decline in the number of new cases. Before the pandemic, an estimated 1.4 million jobs depended on the tourism industry.

Local officials hope that the happy ending of Katayama’s long-awaited Machu Picchu trip could mark the beginning of the sector’s economic recovery.

Major sites in other virus-stricken countries have reopened in recent months.

Rome opened many of its tourist sites in June, requiring the purchase of online tickets for the Colosseum and others. Egypt reopened the Giza pyramids one month later, but interest among foreign visitors was limited. Travel restrictions affecting foreign tourists resulted in steep drops in visitor numbers worldwide, even in destinations that remained accessible throughout much of the year, including Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex.