There are so many options for traveling internationally on a budget these days, but for this blog post, I want to focus on one method which has enabled us personally to travel for so much longer than we anticipated, experience some incredible things, and have amazing stories to tell. And that is Workaway.

What is Workaway?

Workaway (the organization) describes a ‘workaway experience’ as a cultural exchange, you offer a few hours of help in exchange for food and accommodation. And in reality, that is exactly how it works. Food and accommodation are definitely two of our biggest expenses when traveling. I’m sure you can tell where I’m going with this. 😉 It’s no wonder we’ve been able to extend and extend aaaaand extend our travels. 🤩

Budget Friendly or Budget Bestie?

After traveling internationally full-time for the past 11 months, we can confidently say that Workaway is a fantastic way to travel internationally on a budget and if we hadn’t used Workaway on and off for the past 11 months we would most likely have finished our travel budget and be back in South Africa today with our international travel adventure behind us.

For example, for the first six months of travels, we only used Workaway. We would travel from one workaway job to the next and we managed to visit 4 countries, only spending a total of $3 698,75 for the two of us over that 6 month period of travel. How crazy is that!?

But wait, there’s more!

On top of being a great way to travel in a ‘budget friendly’ manner, there are also amazing opportunities to experience other cultures, learn something new, and make some unforgettable friendships. Listen to me, getting all mushy over here… it is true though!

Here are a few examples from our travels:

• Living on a sailboat in Turkey for 2 weeks + learning to sail. You can watch our YouTube video here 👉🏼 Living On a SAILBOAT In TURKEY In The Aegean Sea 🇹🇷
• Working at a traditional Georgian winery and learning about ancient methods of winemaking as well as the Georgian culture Working At A TRADITIONAL GEORGIAN WINERY🇬🇪🍷 | Day In The Life

And of course, you can’t forget about the Workaway opportunities that take you to some incredibly beautiful places such as this little paradise on the coast of Turkey THE BEST PLACE IN TURKEY!? 🇹🇷

How did we find Workaway?

We get asked quite often how we came across Workaway, and the answer is pretty simple. We had a dream to travel the world together, but we didn’t have much money and on top of this our currency was not the strongest either. Marek and I come from South Africa and if you don’t know much about currencies just know that our currency (the Rand) is very weak in comparison to currencies such as the Euro, Dollar, etc. And therefore, when we travel internationally with our South African currency, our money doesn’t get us as far as other currencies would. We knew this and that we needed to make a plan so we could travel for as long as possible with the money we had.

We needed an ‘international travel in a budget friendly manner plan’. No, that one doesn’t sound quite right. We needed a ‘budget friendly international travel plan’. There, much better!

So about 3 years ago when our ‘international travel adventure’ was still just a far-off dream, Marek set out on a quest to scour the internet and find the cheapest way to travel internationally, and that is when we first came across Workaway.

Now, in the beginning we were very unsure of it, and we actually decided to test it out in our home country of South Africa to be sure we could rely on it for our international ventures. Turns out we had a great experience, may have almost lost our drone 😅 and met some fellow South Africans through this workaway.

Our very first Workaway experience 👉🏼 I Lost Our Drone During Our First Workaway Experience 😨

Our Travel Budget

When we set out on our world travels, we had a set budget, and we knew we would only be able to travel for as long as our money would last so naturally, we looked for ways to keep our money lasting as long as possible. Workaway, along with some other budget travel tricks we picked up along the way have helped us to stretch our money much longer than we thought we would be able to. Not to mention that we have also been looking into ways to make money on the road (but that’s a story for another day).

Feeling inspired yet?

So, after hearing all of this, are you feeling inspired to have your own workaway experience? Perhaps caring for Llamas at a Llama farm France (I’m not kidding, we once got a request to come help out at a Llama farm and I’m still pretty bummed it didn’t work out at the time). Honestly, the possibilities with workaway are pretty much endless and it’s made such a difference to our travel experience that we really wanted to share it.

If you are interested in testing out workaway for yourself or seeing what it’s all about, we would really appreciate it if you used our link below to sign up. If you join Workaway using this link, at no extra cost to you, you will be helping us by extending our yearly subscription. 🎉

Our workaway link https://www.workaway.info/invite/1X783BD5

We are also planning on sharing more tips and tricks for using Workaway for the next few weeks. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, please let us know in the comments 😄👇🏼