Biketour in Stockholm

On the 21st of August 2015, the Biketour arrived in Stockholm.

Our sleeping place was meant to be Kulturhuset Cyklopen, a cultural centre in the south of Stockholm. Arriving there, it turned out that there was not really a lot of space to sleep, so we decided to only spend one night there and have a look for new sleeping opportunities for the other 4 nights the next day.

The next day, the Anarchist Bookfare happened, which was one major event on our tour that made us change the whole schedule. We spent the whole day in a nice and sunny back-yard, attending interesting workshops and reading zines.

One particularly interesting workshop was about the Antifenix movement in Czech Republic. There is a big police operation going on in Czech Republic where from one day to the next, the Czech police started searching and evicting a large number of leftist and anarchist spaces across the country, accompanied by a big media campaign spreading right-wing propaganda. The operation is officially called Operation Fenix and has been going on for a year now, and anarchists and other leftist activists are getting arrested, kept in prison under inhumane conditions, and their flats and those of their relatives and friends are being searched, all under no respect to the law. Some of us joined a protest against the operation some days later in front of the Czech embassy.

There was almost a consensus among all the locals who we asked about where we could spend the other nights about the fact that we should wild-camp in the Nacka nature reserve in the south-east of the city. There was a beautiful lake with a beach with quite a lot of people during the last of the few Scandinavian summer days, but none of them seemed to mind the plenty of people who were wild-camping in the bushes around.

Like in all the big cities, quite a lot of people were joining and leaving the tour, so it was difficult to have an organized schedule of common activities, but there were plenty of things to do together like visiting the old-town, visiting the anarchist book Kafé 44, eating vegan ice-cream, visiting a concert by a feminist folk band, spending hours and hours discussing the different options which ferries to take to get to Finland, and, of course, going for a swim. Some of us even went to a rave that started in the middle of the night in a forest nearby.

One highlight was dumpster-diving a new inflatable kayak worth more than 100 € and taking it for a ride on the lake.

On the 26th of August we left Stockholm to cycle to the ferry to the Åland archipelago in the sea between Sweden and Finland.