Upper Hutt’s famous H2O Xtream Aquatic Centre reopened on Monday morning to a crowd of loyal locals. The Spinoff took a dip.

Upper Hutt mayor Wayne Guppy is now the second New Zealand mayor named Wayne to open a popular pool in recent months – but rather than unveiling something new, it was the city’s beloved 29-year-old pool, now with a multimillion-dollar facelift. Standing in a row of city councillors on Monday morning, Guppy gingerly fingered the red ribbon cordoning off the entryway into the freshly revitalised H2O Xtream Aquatic Centre and, using a pair of Lincraft scissors likely purchased from the mall across the road, he tore the material in half with a few deft snips.

Around 50 locals were there to witness the pool’s grand reopening at the crack of dawn, a mix of councillors, families and older swimmers who were treated to a cost-free dip to commemorate the occasion. They’d been waiting two years to be able to use their destination pool again, one that once invited visitors around the nation with its mildly famous “get set to get wet” advertisements.

The tagline has disappeared from the building walls, its long-standing blue and white colourway now swapped for an appropriately expensive-looking black. The pool’s revamped hydroslides still twist above the footpath on Fergusson Drive, and when you walk past, you can hear the “ahh”s and screams of rangatahi sliding down the chutes.

The old bendy blue, pink and green plastic tubes were linked to the need for the pool’s urgent revamp following a chlorine-related incident that made numerous children sick in  April 2021, but it was the wider issue of ageing infrastructure that forced the overhaul. The council’s Long Term Plan 2021-2031 released later that month found the pool would need “significant ongoing maintenance” to ensure its survival, to the tune of $17.5m over the next decade.

By the time the pool closed in February 2023 to begin works, the pricetag was $51m, which had swollen to $55m by late 2024 – a sore spot for some of the city’s ratepayers. But to be fair, the end result does look like a pool that has had tens of millions of dollars spent on it.

There are no immediate aesthetic changes – the spa still bubbles, the mushroom shower in the kids’ area still spouts – except for the hydroslides, now a bit more compact within the building itself and up a revamped tower, where the railing has been made sturdier but you still need to brave a few flights before reaching the top. The yellow slide that used to run adjacent to the lanes no longer exists – maybe a good thing for the serious swimmers.

Tucked in at the mouth of the slide, I waited for the green light then let go, travelling through the new chutes bending here, there and everywhere. Lights in rainbow colours flash through the ride, and as I rushed to the bottom, the water blasting at the other end was strong enough to flush out my sinuses. A trip to the GP and a psychedelic experience, all knocked out in one go on the hydroslide.

A dip in the lanes felt a bit chilly in comparison, but maybe it was just the heating system chugging into gear for the first time. The lanes are essentially the same, but freshened up with refurbishments – and they’re great to swim in. An older woman in the lane next to me flashed a smile and the chirpiest “good morning!” I had ever heard at 6am.

At the back of the facility, there’s a new leisure area for juniors, with a shallow pool and a wading area with a playground for young kids. Don’t wear heels when you’re walking around – a councillor nearly face-planted within five minutes of her arrival.

The changing rooms are more or less the same, but now unburdened by stink. Before you reach them, you’ll notice something new: a 16-seater sauna, ideal for sweating out the beverages consumed around the corner at BrewTown the night before.

Most Upper Hutt locals – or pretty much anybody who has ever visited H2O Xtream, for that matter – have had a terrifying ordeal in the wave pool or river ride. Children will be able to enjoy the character-building opportunity of a near-death experience for many more generations to come – hopefully still soundtracked by the pool’s haunting alarm bell.

H2O Xtream has been to Upper Hutt what Queensgate mall is to its sibling city, Lower Hutt – a centre for socialisation and leisure, a mecca for the masses, a hangout spot because where else are you going to hang out. It’s hard to overstate how much of a chokehold a leisure centre can have on a place where not much else happens.

Guppy stands to hold Aotearoa’s longest-running mayoralty if re-elected in October, but he wouldn’t quite claim the pool’s reopening as an early victory lap. He also, unfortunately, did not pop a manu or get thrown around the river ride, but he did tell The Spinoff he felt his councillors had made a “brave” decision in choosing to “future-proof” the pool. His constituents – many being young families – had been “waiting and waiting and waiting” for this moment, Guppy said, and now it was time to reap the benefits.

“It’ll be great for our city, but it’ll be a regional attraction,” Guppy said. “I just say to the region: come and enjoy it.” Come and enjoy it: not as catchy as “get set to get wet”, but it captures the feeling all the same. And there’s nothing quite like swimming in a pool that you know for sure nobody has peed in – yet.