Ashley first went to the Malaysian rainforest in 1976 and being in the forest was a profound experience for her. In the early 1980s, she was an active member of the Natural History and Conservation Society of Hong Kong.
In 1986, she went to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, where she met with Dr Birute Galdikas. At that time, she was living in New York where there was plenty of focus on the rainforests of South America, a little on the Congo but the third-largest rainforest – Indonesia received hardly any attention and neither did orangutans.