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Breakfast at the refreshingly retro Waiau Hotel is an unapologetic cholesterol bomb: runny eggs, fat-walled slabs of bacon, butter-drenched tomatoes, and a huge pair of sizzling sausages. The Waiau's cheery proprietor, David McNay, is especially proud of his sausages, and understandably so. Tuatapere, population 850, is the self-proclaimed Sausage Capital of New Zealand.

"You'll be needing that," McNay coaxes as I dig into the mound of grub at six o'clock one Saturday morning in March. "Muesli won't get you to the top of Hump Ridge." He's right — by the end of the day I feel I could eat ten of his gargantuan breakfasts.

I've come to the southwesternmost town on New Zealand's South Island to hike the Hump Ridge Track. The country is world-reknowned for its network of Great Walks, and the Hump Ridge Track promises to be a magnificent addition. The three-day, 33-mile circuit combines the dramatic Waitutu coastline, native podocarp and beech forest, and sub-alpine meadows. It's all tucked into the southeastern corner of the 2.9-million-acre Fiordland National Park, part of the Southwest New Zealand World Heritage Area.

Creating the Hump Ridge Track has been an enormous community endeavour, and the Tuatapereans have high hopes that will lure enough trekkers to boost the local economy. Some $1.5 million has been raised from public and private sources since the Tuatapere Hump Ridge Track Trust was set up in 1996. Bthe track took nine months to construct; nearly 3200 people completed the circuit in its first season, which ended in April, 2002.

"You must understand that it's not a walking track," McNay points out, wagging a spatula at me. "It's a tramping track. It's quite steep and very muddy, which is why serious trampers quite like it." Then he winks and adds, "Have another sausage, and you'll be good as gold to hump the Hump."

In New Zealand, where well-heeled trekkers jet in to hike groomed legends such as the Milford and Kepler tracks, sporty Kiwis note the distinction between trampers and walkers, the latter being the sort who require a guide to serve them gourmet food and wipe their bums, and above all, not like to get muddy. (Never mind that both overnight hut on the Hump Ridge Track have helipads and flush toilets.) More for company than for service I have booked a guide, Robert McIntyre, who was described to me as "a classic Kiwi bloke." I'd took this to mean he'd be some curly-haired young Frodo I'd have to sing gooey Crowded House ditties with on the trail. So I was pleased to meet a bullish 60-year-old former rugby player with a crew cut and boxer's nose, having a locally brewed Speight's beer in the Waiau's jolly pub the night before.

McIntyre comes from a dynasty of hardy Scottish sawmillers who for generations harvested gigantic rimu and beech trees from the nearby hills until the logging boom went bust. These days he tends his garden and works as a guide when he's not hunting possums, a loathed nonnative species.

McIntyre picks me up at the hotel in his Russian-built Lada four-by-four, and we chug down a twisty two-lane highway, passing undulating green fields nibbled by sheep, and hawks picking at possum roadkill, until we arrive at the Hump Ridge Track trailhead, above a stretch of surf-slapped coast called Bluecliffs Beach.

The lushly forested giant's foot of Hump Ridge juts its toes at the dark-blue sea ahead of us, and McIntyre points to a nub that seems impossibly far away. "See those grey dots just below the top of the ridge? That's Okaka Hut, where we'll be castling tonight." It's time to get a move on, given that the hut is about 3000 feet up and 11 miles away. He hands me a tall wooden staff and grabs one for himself, and then he's ahead of me down the beach, his tree-trunk calves packed into thick sea-foam-green socks knitted by his wife, Irene; gaitors; and well-worn leather boots. He sets a speedy pace that won't let up for the next three days.

Reaching the top will take us about nine hours, the first five of which are fairly unrigorous, the trail hugging the coast as it takes us west from beach to forest, passing through Maori-owned land before entering Fiordland National Park. Swing bridges allow us to cross ravines, and giant totara trees tower over us. Early in the day, just before we reach a right turn at Flat Creek, we pass three elderly hikers coming from the other direction — the rugged old Kiwis look like they're returning from a Sunday stroll rather than a 33-mile trek.

From Flat Creek we head up a mild gradient, the surrounding forest becoming progressively dense with the massive trunks of black and silver beeches. A balmy breeze blows through from the sea, and occasional bursts of rain — some of the ten feet per year this region receives — cause the foilage overhead to drip. The trail is muddy in places, and lengths of boardwalk (some of it hundreds of yards long) have been constructed to protect the forest floor from erosion. Our boot-clomps echo through the trees as we walk along it.

At lunchtime we wolf down sandwiches, fill our bottles from a stream running under a little bridge, and then begin the long, steep climb to the top. "It's a good grunt ahead," says McIntyre. "I guarantee it." For the next three hours we keep a grueling pace up to rocky Stag Point, at 2510 feet. Once we're there, the rain comes down in sheets, but the grade eases as we trudge the final hour to Okaka Hut. If you're used to tent camping, it's a shock seeing your first New Zealand trekking hut. Okaka Hut is cantilevered off the slope like something out of Architectural Digest. The hut sleeps 40, with four to a room in bunk beds; most of the rooms have sensational views of the mountains and sea. If that isn't enough, there are also flush toilets, solar-powered lights, hot water in the kitchen, cold showers, cookstoves, a helipad, and a warden who scrubs the place down each morning when everyone leaves. Not bad for $20 per night. When McIntyre and I arrive, drenched and tired, we find a lively crowd of trampers in the communal room, swilling wine and beer. I am amazed by their energy, until I learn that out of the 40, most of them Kiwis, 23 had their packs helicoptered to the hut at $22 apiece. One overcaffeinated thirtysomething is outside, chatting away into his hand, escaping the rule against cellphones inside the huts. "Most of this lot aren't real trampers" grumbles McIntyre. "They just want to be able to tell everyone else they've done it."

After spending a sleepless night in a room with a pair of librarians from Dunedin and a horribly snoring German girl, I convene with McIntyre and we head atop the ridge to start the track's 11-mile second installment. A loop of boardwalk winds us around wind-carved limestone tors, through sub-alpine meadows and low shrubs, past tiny lakes. The views are grand — out to sea and deep into the wilds of Fiordland National Park, where Lake Hauroko, the country's deepest lake, shimmers in the distance.

The day is pretty much a mudfest. As kaka parrots chatter above us in the trees and the rain beats down, we trudge through muck down the back of Hump Ridge toward the hut at Port Craig, on the coast. About midday we reach an old logging track and arrive at the 410-foot Percy Burn viaduct, the largest wooden viaduct in the world, which takes us across a deep gorge. Then it's a couple hours of clumping along an old tramway to the hut. Built near the remains of an abandoned logging village, the Port Craig hut isn't as dramatic as Okaka but is equally functional and clean. The sand fleas, however, are so bad that we all hide in our rooms — except for one vigorous gent in his sixties, lobster-red and chuckling about shrinkage, who braves the chilly ocean below to swim with some Hector's dolphins.

On our last day, our walk takes us back along the coast, on a comparatively gentle 10.5 mile path that moves from beaches, where we pass boulders covered with cormorants, to forests where fantails follow us. When we finally reach the trailhead and I bang the gunky mud from my hiking boots, I'm ready to bestow on myself a new title: tramper.

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