The mackerel road out of Kyoto: two days to Obama and back

A stone marker stands at the north end of Demachi Masugata, a covered arcade in Kyoto. It names a road rather than a shop: Saba Kaidō (鯖街道), the mackerel road. Salted fish came over the mountains from Wakasa Bay on foot, some seventy kilometres, curing to the right saltiness as it walked. The Hokuriku Shinkansen reaches Tsuruga now, an hour up that coast, and touches none of this road.

Day one: into the Kutsuki valley

The old route is Route 367 today. It leaves Kyoto through Ōhara, narrows into cedar, and runs about two hours by bus from Demachiyanagi to the Fukui border.

Kumagawa-juku (熊川宿) is where to get off: one street of plaster-walled merchant houses with a stone water channel along its edge, cold enough in August to stand a bottle in. A small museum halfway along sets out what a porter carried.

Obama, where the fish started

Obama is another hour on, on Wakasa Bay. The port keeps a morning market, and the town keeps the preparations the road required: heshiko (へしこ), mackerel buried in rice bran and salt for a year and sliced thin, and yakisaba, a whole fish on a skewer over charcoal.

Sanchōmachi (三丁町), four minutes inland, is a lane of lattice-fronted teahouses the width of two people passing. It is quiet the way a residential street is quiet.

Day two: the Nara with a sea

The temples are why the night is worth booking. Myōtsū-ji (明通寺), twenty minutes south in a valley of cedar, holds a main hall and a three-storey pagoda from the thirteenth century, both national treasures, and the steps are often empty on a weekday. Nearby Jingū-ji (神宮寺) sends water toward Nara each March; Tōdai-ji draws it ten days later.

小浜は「海のある奈良」と呼ばれてきた。

Going back is a local train: the Obama Line east to Tsuruga, where the shinkansen waits for everyone who skipped these two days. The slower way runs south along Lake Biwa into Kyoto at dusk.