While my friend and I were road tripping south from Auckland to Wellington, we found ourselves with some (planned by me) spare time, and my friend … he who was doing the driving…  pretty much spontaneously decided he wanted to use said time to take a scenic route option his phone had notified him of, rather than stay on the most direct one. So, we turned off of New Zealand’s highway 1 and onto the Manawatu Scenic Route.

Pretty much as SOON as we left route 1 we were happy we’d done so…

We found ourselves driving through a very windy and narrow river canyon type road (which was much more fun for him from a driving perspective than the mostly straight highway 1), with sides that were almost chalky white but shot through with green

and a road that took us higher and higher up the side of the gorge, after which we entered a flatter area (at the top apparently)with some farms, and a GORGEOUS mountain range in the distance

And then to MY delight (he was driving so past he didn’t even see it as we whizzed past) I noticed a stopping area with a sign and picnic area, and demanded that he stop and return us to it. [One of the many reasons we’re not traveling together anymore is he likes driving through places and considers them seen, while I like stopping each and every time I spot a good potential photo, so that I can take good pictures. Ironically, after I ended it with him, he wanted me to share with him said pictures.]

looking down into the gorge I could see what the original settler meant, in terms of it looking like the dress circle seating in an Opera house (read the image above)…

It wasn’t until afterwards when I researched the ‘Ruahine dress-circle’ that I learned that there was a side road we could have used to go down into it where there is a very popular swimming hole down there which we missed.

Unfortunately, since he’s not one to carefully plan things in advance, my travel buddy was driving through the area sort of haphazardly (if I’D been the one to PLAN it, I’d have known in advance about the stopping location and the possibility of the swimming hole) and his GPS on his phone instead of taking us through the length of the whole scenic drive redirected us OFF of it once we got past the end of Ruahine Road, and (as he’s not a planner) he didn’t realize we actually had sufficient time and would have had MUCH better views had we stayed on it…  because from what I’m reading about it now, as I write this, we really only got a bit of taste of it…

That said, we did get to see this view along Rangiwahia Road (which was NOT part of the scenic drive) after heading back to Route 1, which included our last view of Mount Ruapehu where Peter Jackson filmed his Mordor and Mount Doom in the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.