Janhavi Gosavi meets Dua Asim, who has been chosen by the YWCA as one of its Y25 inspiring young leaders for 2023.

If you were asked to picture a young, adventurous, outdoorsy Kiwi who was keen to go on week-long tramps without a shower, you probably wouldn’t picture Dua. 

Born in Tāmaki Makaurau and now living in Ōtautahi, Dua Asim is a 23-year-old Pakistani hijabi hiker. When she isn’t studying Civil Engineering, she’s escaping to the great outdoors and sharing her travels with her 125,000 followers on her Instagram account @duadiscovers. Her posts celebrate nature and make hiking feel accessible to locals and tourists alike. 

Dua’s family weren’t the type to go camping on the weekends but her parents raised her to be a “free-range” kid. She grew up on a lifestyle block and spent a lot of time outside on her farm, taking care of animals, so it's no surprise she grew an affinity for nature. 

She was always curious about outdoor sports but the people she saw occupying that space didn’t look like her – a brown, hairy, South Asian woman with a hijab. She couldn’t be what she couldn’t see, so she presumed the outdoors weren’t meant for her. 

That changed once Dua came to university, which provided her with access to people knowledgeable about the outdoors. 

While living in a hall of residence during the March 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, she befriended a group of American exchange students. They all loved hiking and were so full of life that when they told Dua she could learn to hike, she believed them. 

“I didn’t know the first thing about camping but, I was like, I’m going to roll with it”. 

Dua fell in love with hiking because it enabled her to use her own two legs to explore the world, especially places that could only be accessed via foot. New Zealand’s dramatic landscapes could switch from glaciers to beaches, volcanoes to mountain ranges, which kept her fascinated.

It took Dua’s community a while to understand that she found hiking through forests and swimming in lakes… fun. While no one explicitly said this to her, tramping or travelling were not seen as being “for” hijabi women. With that assumption came the fear that adventurousness might prevent a Muslim woman from finding a suitable husband. “There’s a lot of love in the Pakistani community, where the aunties who caution you are trying to protect you from hurt.”

But a love for the outdoors did not prevent her from getting married, which is an important part of Pakistani culture. In fact, she met her now-husband through tramping. 

Online visibility has made a world of difference. Ever since Dua started publicly posting about her adventures, those same aunties have reached out with support and enthusiasm. Her content makes their young daughters feel more confident because they think “if Dua can do it, I can do it”. 

Dua never once imagined herself becoming a content creator, or amassing a large following. But she also never imagined herself hiking the Great Walks of Aotearoa. 

“I don’t want to be recognised as ‘the face’ of Muslim women hikers, but I am a face and that helps.” 

Dua aims to give off “big sister energy” so she tries to reply to every question she gets in her DMs, even if it takes her weeks. Her followers share their own hiking stories with her and tell her she gives them hope. 

“That’s huge for me, because hope is what gives you the will to try,” she says. 

But her biggest reason for creating her social media platform is to give back to her quiet 15-year-old self who never had the representation she needed. 

Through posting her experiences online, Dua addresses the barriers to entry for outdoor activities. 

She’s noticed that the media sends subliminal messaging to women, convincing them they need to look a certain way or have peak physical fitness to experience the outdoors. Dua hopes her presence online shows women that “the outdoor space is for everyone, it doesn’t discriminate.” 

Another barrier is knowing what gear to get and being able to afford it. “My first tramp, I packed a normal pot from my kitchen to cook with, and everyone else brought their collapsible portable tramping pots,” she recalls, covering her face with embarrassment. 

As a broke student, Dua got all of her gear second-hand. She bought puffer jackets from Facebook Marketplace and her first tent was $60 off of TradeMe. Dua also found that op-shops have a good selection of outdoor clothes suitable for modest dressing. But she buys her woollen socks brand-new - “I do have some boundaries”. 

Dua has now evolved from novice to leader. She’s about to take her engineering friends on a five day tramping trip to the Abel Tasman and she predicts she will probably end up leading the way. 

Some things will never change, like her parents being concerned for her safety and insisting she travel in a group. “They’re so afraid I’m going to get killed… they didn’t move all this way to New Zealand for me to go die on a mountain.”

In the near future, Dua wants to start facilitating group hikes for hijabis so that women like her feel safer and less alone. She also aims to go hiking in Pakistan and hopes she might meet like-minded women there. 

But for now, Dua has been chosen as one of the Y25’s inspiring young leaders for 2023.

Running annually, the Y25 programme highlights women and non-binary trailblazers aged 15-25 from all over Aotearoa. The YWCA is an intersectional feminist organisation focused on changing systems to better support the development of young wāhine and irarere through collective solidarity. They started the Y25 in 2020 to celebrate the achievements of wāhine who are change-makers and challenge the status quo. 

Dua will take part in a one-year programme with her cohort of young leaders, where they will connect with each other and have access to mentorship and networking opportunities from YWCA Tāmaki Makaurau.