How to get a group of cyclists into Belarus

As you might have read in our belarus border chaos blog post, getting into Belarus wasn’t easy for us, and our visa application was rejected several times, and then we were rejected on the border several times. When we were preparing the tour, we were not finding a lot of information on how to do this, and the information that we found was often contradictory or simply wrong. Even the border police of Belarus themselves often gave us wrong information or didn’t know how things work. So here is the ultimate guide on how to get a group of cyclists into…

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Links #8: Cycling Kung Fu Nuns, Fancy Women on Bikes, Undriving License, Reclaim the Fields Assembly, AllCyclistsAreBeautiful-Blog

Hundreds of Kung Fu Buddhist nuns are biking the Himalayas to oppose human trafficking Thousands of ‘Fancy Women on Bikes’ defy intimidation to claim the streets of Turkey make your undriving license and don’t use cars Reclaim-the-Fields Europe Assembly in Freiburg 18th to 22nd of January 2017 DIY-Cycling-Blog of Biketour-Participants, amongst others in Winter in northern Scandinavia And these awesome things appeared in the archive of social movements in vienna:

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winter meeting 2017

Preparations for the Ecotopia Biketour 2017 have most definitely begun! The biketour had an open meeting in Berlin last weekend where we reflected on last years tour, reviewed our online organisation structures, shared ideas for the biketour 2017, planned a timeline of what we want to do, and, actually made some decisions!! The most important one being the region of where the biketour will cycle in 2017. After careful consideration of the biketours values and priorities, we are pleased to announce that the region for the next biketour will be Germany, France, east Spain and possibly Switzerland. Over the course…

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Drawings

Hello world, this is Lukas writing to you. I’ll show you some drawings I made on the tour. I tried to find myself some trash to transform into art. Like old books or any piece of paper. “Out of trash!” As cycling is somehow the main thing on the biketour, I wanted to do drawings of this as well! So I had to draw while cycling… It was quiet a challenge because of the bumpy roads and the always moving models.     www.lukasseite.wordpress.com

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Free Riga!

We reached the our first host in the latvian capital shortly before midnight after our hardcore cycling day. It was the Kreicbike-workshop. A place where loads of crazy custom- and freakbikes are built. Also motorized ones. It was an impressive place with tons of tools and equipment. They were also related to Radi Vidi Pats, the other freakbike-workshop we were visiting earlier in Liepaja. Unfortunately, here we didn’t feel as well as we did there. It was not a very comfy place to sleep and to hang out. And we were facing sexist and macho behaiviour by the guys using…

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2 days, 180 km, 3 punctures, 1 thunderstorm

After having survived the hippie-festival the biketour was heading Riga. We had 2 days to make the ~170km. Quiet tough, regarding that normally, we do normally between 40 and 80 kilometers per day… But we had a good road and not really any questions about the way. Just all the time along the coast. Never ending pinewoods on both sides of the road, every now and then a tiny village. Just cycling and cycling and cycling, meeting others having their break aside the road or on the beach, passing them, meeting someone else pulling a trailer, having a break and…

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Biketour-Inventary

On the long cycling days… you might find yourself talking about anything and everything with your companions for the day. One topic that came up was STUFF. some people seemed to have just 2 bike bags and nothing else, some people have entire trailers for their pet (see past posts with the dog!) whilst some people seemed to be balancing half a dozen stuff sacks on their racks (ahem.. me). A few of us made comparive lists of our personal equipment and decided to publish them – this could either be read as a packing list guide (or, what not…

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