How a trip fail helped me recapture the joy of traveling

I sat down to tell you all about the extraordinary rock gardens I saw in Kyoto last weekend, but it wasn’t long before I realized that what made them extra-special was…they’re not what I went there to see.

I’d beavered around looking up exactly when my friend took a memorable photo of the plum trees in full bloom at Jonangu Shrine last year, then booked a weekend trip to go ogle them for myself. Got up at oh-dark-thirty to take the bullet train, tossed my stuff in a locker at Kyoto Station, hopped on the first train to plum nirvana, and speed-walked thirty minutes to the shrine to get there before the crowds. Which turned out not to be as much of problem as I feared, because when I got there…

Yeah. The plum grove equivalent of deafening silence.

To be fair, they did warn me at the desk when I bought my ticket, and as a consolation prize, gave me a nice postcard to show how the garden looked at this same time last year.

It didn’t take me long to walk briskly through that cold and unwelcoming landscape and find myself standing dejectedly on the street outside with a whole empty day ahead.

So…now what?

The thing about plum trees is that they bloom in winter, when every other living thing is still snoring away with eye mask askew, teeth unbrushed. Even the moss is kinda brown and scraggly.

But…you know what looks great in every season? ROCKS. And what is Kyoto famous for? ROCK GARDENS.

So I trudged back to the train station, and guess what? The famous rock garden at Tofuku-ji did not disappoint. In fact, not only did it deliver a boatload of grand rocks for the price of admission…

plus world-class sand raking…

there were even MORE gardens beyond the main one.

This one re-used bits of a torn-down temple building to represent stars in the Big Bear constellation (which you might know as the Big Dipper). If you look carefully, it even tells you which stars shine brightest.

The razor-sharp trimming and composition of the next garden could be appreciated without the distraction of the pink azalea blossoms that cover these cubes in spring…

and this garden is usually photographed at the peak of fall leaf season, when the artful checkerboard of stone squares is overshadowed by attention-grabbing red and gold maple trees. If I hadn’t been there in winter, I wouldn’t have noticed the lone and poignant hawk surveying its territory from the tree above.

And if I hadn’t been disappointed by the plums, I never would have been there at the exact moment this beautiful bride was having her wedding photos taken on the temple’s covered bridge.

Best of all? You’re going to laugh, but I hadn’t realized that Tofuku-ji is home to an exceptional National Cultural Treasure: the dorm toilets of yore! Known as the hyakunin benjō (100 person toilets), this beautifully preserved poopatorium is where the resident monks took care of business back in the 1300s.

Due to my rabidly diligent plum planning, the day was still only half over. Since rock gardens seemed to be a winning strategy, on to the next one that looked visit-worthy, even in winter.

This one surprised me, in the best way possible! Daitoku-ji looks like a single temple on the map, but the grand entry is actually a gateway…

to a whole village of smaller temples, each with its own exquisite garden.

Only a few were open to the public, but what told me this was my lucky day after all is that the one at Ōbai-in that’s usually only open in November for a few weeks was having a special opening day, right when I was there. This tea garden was designed by Sen-no-Rikyu—the father of tea ceremony—and it was like no rock garden I’d ever seen.

Instead of just occupying a courtyard, the garden flowed throughout the grounds like a river, parting for rocks, shrines…

encircling teahouses…

before sliding past peaceful pavilions with sliding shoji screens framing the view…

until it emptied into this vast and placid ocean, with stones representing the Buddha and enlightenment on the far shore.

In contrast, the garden next door at Zuiho-in was a spectacular depiction of islands being buffeted by a turbulent sea (or whatever other challenges one might meditate upon while contemplating that vista)…

and at the third garden I visited, Daisen-in’s pair of perfect cones represented a different kind of obstacle to enlightenment.

By now, I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. I don’t know if it was all those Zen gardens that whacked me upside the head, but to paraphrase a famous Buddhist belief about attachment…

Expectations lead to suffering.

And if there’s anything we have expectations-with-a-capital-E about these days, it’s travel. The internet is filled to bursting with itineraries that are slavishly built around “seeing the cherry blossoms,” but even if all the careful planning is matched by perfect weather and perfect timing, travelers are disappointed when they see this:

but they were expecting this

Yeah, speaking of expectations, Photoshop is not the traveler’s friend.

Because here’s the truth every internet photographer knows: nobody gets it right the first time. It takes visit after visit to figure out where to stand and what time of day to be there and exactly which day the flowers will peak that year. And even once they get that right, hello rain.

Do you know how many years it took me to get this photo at the Nezu Shrine?

Five. Yeah, I went back three or four time during every azalea season for five years.

And sure, when I finally landed on a year when rain hadn’t spoiled them and bugs weren’t eating them and everything was blooming all at once, it felt AMAZING. But you know what? Even in the years when it was less than perfect, it was still hella beautiful. I always left that garden feeling better than when I arrived.

So here’s what I learned about how to come back from your once-in-a-lifetime trip feeling like the luckiest person alive, even if it doesn’t deliver a must-see item or two:

If life insists on giving you rocks, go find the ones that are in rock gardens.

You don’t have to pretend that plum trees without plum blossoms are as nice as ones with. But you can shrug off your disappointment, and look around to see what other opportunities you might have missed if your original plans hadn’t been thwarted. Sometimes, you have an even better time if you change course and are able to greet each unexpected pleasure with glee.

And just to show you that the rock garden thing wasn’t just a one-off and could only happen in Kyoto, the same thing happened to me just a month before, on the trip I took with fellow author Susan Spann.

We’d geared up to go snow hiking at the place where this photo was taken

but alas, a heavy snowstorm stopped all the trains at Niigata, with no chance to get any closer to Haguro-san until at least the next day. But getting stuck in Niigata turned out to be a great stroke of luck! If we’d continued to the temple like we’d planned, we wouldn’t have seen…

Niigata’s Hakusan shrine gate in the snow…

a snow hat of epic proportions…

a hanachōzu flower basin with snow on top…

The next day, the train to Haguro-san still wasn’t running, so we found out which ones were, decided to zip over to Kanazawa, and exchanged temples and snow hiking for a renowned garden, some sake ice cream and a castle.

If we’d made it all the way to Haguro-san, we wouldn’t have enjoyed this sake tasting that ended in amazake soft serve with mirin on top…

while the snow gently fell in Kanazawa’s historic Higashi Chaya geisha district outside.

We wouldn’t have wolfed down some absolutely delicious yakiniku at a hole-in-the-wall backstreet restaurant for dinner…

on a magical snowy evening…

or seen the gorgeous Kenroku-en garden…

and Kanazawa Castle buried under pillows of white.

I guess what I’m saying is, in a world where everyone wants what they want and they want it now, if we step away from thinking so hard about getting our heart’s desire and open our hearts to experiences we didn’t expect, we’ll not only be happier, we’ll come closer to the child-like wonder we used to feel when we woke up each day and had no idea what delights might be just around the corner.

Not just in travel, but in life.

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