In the best-selling book and motion picture ‘Eat Pray Love,’ Elizabeth Gilbert spends an entire year on the road. She visits three different countries for four months each. How did she do it? Apart from having a book deal already in place to fund her journey, she also travelled smart and travelled slow, especially in her choice of lodging. From Italy to India and Indonesia, she chose longer-term apartment and lodge rental.

If you are willing to skip some of the hit-and-run sightseeing and country hopping of gotta-see-it-all travel, there’s a much simpler way to stay on budget and on the road for a long time: Take it slow, base your travels in one place and opt for a work exchange. Today, there are more and more ways for the industrious slow traveller to find work and break even.

Yes, we did use spirits while making small delicious cheese pies, called ‘kalitsounia,’ in a traditional hillside village of western Crete, Greece. Koula Barydakis, our ebullient chef instructor, began our local cooking lessons by pouring a shot of raki for herself and her students as we toasted the traditional Cretan diet, one of the healthiest in the world.