If Bicycles Took Up as Much Space as Cars Mesmerizing Photos of People Lying in a Week’s Worth of Their Trash Syrians cross Norway’s Arctic border on bicycles Critical Mass from London to Calais – Bikes Beyond Borders The Invisible Bike Helmet Johnnyrandom | Bespoken (full song)
After Jönköping, the Biketour stayed at Bossgården, a small farm on the country-side between Falköping and Tidaholm. One of the farm buildings was built in 1818 and still has a traditional reed roof, making the farm an official cultural heritage site. On the farm lives a small family with children, and some volunteers are around as well. There is a big vegetable garden that is being operated as a CSA (community-supported agriculture, where people pay a fixed rate to the farmer but get a varying amount of food depending how much grows). We stayed for two nights and helped with…
Already before the tour I noticed a town called “Trollhättan” on the map. When I looked it up on Wikipedia to find out about what its name meant (it means Troll’s hat), I read the absurd story of the Trollhättan Falls. The city’s most iconic landmark and probably biggest tourist attraction are the Trollhättan Falls, a huge waterfall in the middle of the city where the river Göta, which goes from Sweden’s biggest and Europe’s third-biggest lake Vänern to Göteborg, falls 32 metres. Unfortunately, a big hydro-electric power station was built next to the waterfall in the 19th century, with…
Copenhagen Here was the first city-stop of the bike tour, and a place where quite a lot of people arrived. The newcomers arrived after a long journey to a slightly confusing sight – a half demolished warehouse, with one wall and half a roof missing, and many bricks in little mounds dotted around, with tents in between. Welcome to Flyende By! (http://flydendeby.org/) Translated as the floating city, the the building is a workspace for building various boat projects. The place where we were staying is their warehouse, but they were in the process of moving –literally everything, which explained the…
The Biketour started on the 18th of June in Makvärket, a cultural and environmental collective in Knabstrup, about 75 km west of Copenhagen. It is an old tile factory, a huge building in a small village on the country-side that was bought some years ago and is being transformed into an art project. The building is so huge that some of us, who had lived there before for a couple of months, still kept discovering hidden rooms that they had never seen before. In the building there is a huge free-shop, a wood, metal and bike workshop, a skate park,…
The 25th Ecotopia Biketour has started rolling a couple of days ago. We will cycle for three months from Copenhagen to Helsinki, via Malmö, Göteborg, Oslo, Stockholm and Turku and visiting lots of ecological projects and political groups on the way. The route has been fixed day-by-day for several months already, and we have a huge list of possible projects and groups to visit in case our plans change spontaneously. So how is a tour like this organised? The preparation process consists of three main groups of tasks: finding projects to visit and forming a route out of them, making…
Ecotopia Biketour made it on the news today, although in a very unusual way: Three foreigners with bikes made the usual iconography of Friday protests in Skopje. They were cycling around Bit market today and suddenly found themselves amidst the protesters, wondering where they had gotten lost. Organizers of the protests and police quickly pointed out that they should get on the road. Translation by Google Translate News link, YouTube link
On the 31st of July we cycled through a valley in south-eastern Serbia towards the border of Kosovo. Some small villages every couple of kilometers, not a lot of people on the streets, barely any traffic. The night before it had already felt weird to see a big truck or bus making their way into the darkness of the mountains every now and again, not really seeming like there was much to go to. The further up the hill we went, the more quiet it became, until suddenly we saw a big queue of trucks on the road waiting to…
