Koru Dojo - New Zealand

Recently I attended a training camp with seven others in the beautiful Coromandel of New Zealand. We stayed at the Koru Dojo built and hosted by David Lynch and his wife Hisae. The dojo is the perfect place for a small group of serious budo students to sleep, eat and train. It is built onto the main house and David and Hisae are very welcoming and great conversationalists. To top it all off, they have a hot tub to relax the muscles after a day of training.

We drove to the dojo on a Friday and trained in the afternoon. We then had dinner prepared by the wife of one of the budoka who is a professional chef!  The food was exquisite. We socialised in the evening and drank wine and sake until about midnight.

The next morning we started with a pre-breakfast training session consisting of conditioning exercises. After a hearty breakfast we trained through to lunch. Then it was onto afternoon training, dinner and then more sake.

The third day started with conditioning exercises before breakfast again, we then fueled up and trained through the morning. We then packed up our gear and cleaned the dojo. For the final lunch of the weekend we walked into the bush and ate near a waterfall. 

Then it was final farewells and back in the cars for the trip home. 

Over the whole weekend we covered such things as sword and tanto disarms, kumitachi, kumitanto, battojutsu, taijutsu and even a bit of shiatsu for aching bodies. 

In the Koru Dojo, NZ.

It was a fantastic weekend full of earnest training and lots of laughs in the breaks.