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.

Easter in Lithuania is the second biggest festival after Christmas. To this day, it is a family event that combines both Christian celebration and age-old Lithuanian tradition. According to the old ways, Easter marks the rejuvenation of nature. In years gone by, the festival had a fixed date – on the spring equinox. Around that time the temperature rises above freezing and green starts coming back into the world.

I peered into the dark, foul-smelling room. Down on all fours, pacing back and forth in anxiety, the victim awaited his death sentence. About 15 paces away, standing in front of a dirty wooden shed, holding a sharpened knife and dressed in a bloody apron was the stoic old executioner flanked by his young wild-eyed henchmen. I hadn’t realised what I was getting myself into months earlier when I accepted my friend’s invitation to a “very special family event in the countryside.” Her devilish grin should have tipped me off, but the dea of a traditional Czech pig-killing feast, or zabíjačka, really intrigued me.

Fed up with the endless grey and drizzle of a London winter and the monotony of my office job, I decided it was time to finally make my African dream a reality. For some time, I had been entertaining thoughts of roaming the Kenyan savannah on a big-game safari, but I was also keen to get to know the country and its people on a more intimate level, not merely scrape the surface as a package tourist.