United Kingdom

The visa comes first on this trip. A UK visit visa is applied for online, with biometrics given at an application centre in Pakistan, and the officer is looking at your work, income, family ties and travel history. We prepare that application with you and tell you exactly which documents to gather. Start early, because processing times move, and ask us before you pay what happens to your money if the visa is refused: the visa fee is not refunded, and we put the rest in writing for your trip.

The country itself is worth the effort. It is small, and that is the part that surprises people who have only seen it on television. You can be in Edinburgh in the morning and the Lake District the same afternoon. London by itself will take everything you give it: Westminster and the river, the museums that cost nothing to walk into, Regent Street and Oxford Street, Regent's Park mosque, and Edgware Road and Whitechapel where the food finally tastes like home if you have had a week of it not doing. North of it there is Manchester and Birmingham and Bradford, where a great many Pakistani families actually live, so for a lot of our travellers this trip is half sightseeing and half seeing people they are related to. Then Edinburgh, which is a better-looking city than London and knows it, the Highlands and the lochs above it, Stratford and Oxford and Cambridge in between, and Snowdonia if you want mountains without leaving the island.

A few honest practicalities. It is expensive, and the number that stings is not the flight, it is the daily one: a hotel room in central London, a train ticket bought late, a taxi you did not need to take. Halal food is easy in any city and gets thinner in the countryside. The weather does not really have a season so much as a mood, so take a waterproof in July and expect it to be useful. The light is the thing nobody warns you about: in June it is bright at ten at night and in December it is dark by four in the afternoon, and both of those change what a day can hold.