All posts tagged: explore

Vanguard of Exploration: Farha Bi on the Road

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Close that voice down in your head that’s telling you to prepare for a little bit longer or that maybe it’s not right at the right time and just do it. Farha MZAB magazine caught up with Farha Bi also known as Brown Girl on a Bike. Farha is based in Birmingham with Kashmiri roots documenting her cycling adventures through her Instagram page @browngirlonabike. We interviewed Farha about her culture, upbringing and key moments during her travels. What is your full name and what does it translate to? My name is Farha Bi and it means Joyful Woman. I think its root is Farsi but is found in Arabic and in Urdu as well. Bi is a common surname for women in South Asia, although I recently learned it’s also used a lot in China, with a different meaning.  Tell us more about your upbringing. What were the departure points, which shaped who you are today?  I am a brummie at heart, living in Birmingham until I was 18. I am also Kashmiri with both  …

Blazing a Trail: Amira the Wanderlust

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Amira the Wanderlust is an adventurer in every sense of the word. Hiker, explorer, mountaineer and expedition leader as well as founder of the adventure group ‘The Wanderlust Women’, she is the contemporary Argonaut rekindling a modern take on the 15th-17th C age of exploration. Much like the anthropologist, Amira travels from region to region discovering and documenting – the only catch being that Amira is a cultural force within herself. Donned in a hijab and niqab (face veil) Amira looks starkly different to the collective imagining of a contemporary explorer. In a global society from Macron’s France and his sanctions against the hijab to the female Iranian resistance to forced/ imposed hijab, Amira is emblematic of audacious courage, existing with neither tensions as her point of reference but rather her religion and her desire to explore our home that is earth, being her guiding principles. Captured on Instagram traversing the valleys of the Lake District, the terrain of Ben Nevis or paddle boating in a National Park all while maintaining her religion and her …