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…

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The road into Jönköping was one giant downhill, and at  the bottom we arrived at the kulturhuset (http://kulturhusetjonkoping.se/). We were warmly welcomed with hot coffee (and hot showers!) and shown to our sleeping place for the next three nights, a studio room with wall mirrors. And the whole building was quite huge! When we were shown the sleeping room, there were two other bike tourers already in there! It turned out they were touring together long distance and were passing through Jönköping on their way to Uddebo, where we had just come from. Interestingly, they had reclining style bikes, which…

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The first stop after Göteborg was the small village of Uddebo (http://uddebo.se/), home to around 300 people. A few years ago this small village was given new life when people from the city seeking alternative ways of living moved there, buying previously empty houses, fixing them up, and giving them new life. Since then, the village has grouped together more to start work on restoring a village building called the yellow house. Currently used as a freeshop and cafe, once restored the building will have many more potential uses.   The community has also built a sauna next to the…

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Göteborg offered us many different options  to fill our 3 day stay in this city. We started with a visit to Kompani 415 (http://kompani415.tumblr.com/) which is workspace for cultural and creative projects. Some of the people working there are writers, some people are making bamboo bikes, and many other different things. One of the projects happening there was preparing wood to build a geodesic dome, which some of the bike group helped with the cutting process. We also gave another presentation about the biketour at the bike-friendly Llama Lloyd cafe (http://www.llamalloyd.se/) where we spoke to some people and gained another…

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After Malmö, we cycled 60km slightly inland to a forest garden near Höör. The forest garden is an example of an edible eco-system with a wide variety of trees and plants. It is also used as an educational tool, and the mainly volunteer run group also offer courses and hand craft projects. The project has been running for eleven years and aims to have more traditional interactions with nature. It was really beautiful, with lots of pathways and fruit trees and even a pond, and a big firepit in the middle where we cooked dinner.       After cycling further north…

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In Malmö we were invited to stay by Kontrapunkt  (http://www.kontrapunktmalmo.net/) – a counter culture group who were running many different projects from a workshop space and social centre. Except we didn’t know this before we arrived, and when some of us arrived to the address, we saw a punk concert happening with many people outside and mistook it for the sleeping space! But we discovered that the place we were meant to be sleeping at was just behind, before we took out our sleeping bags in the punk concert. We were instantly impressed by the workshop space on Kontrapunkt –…

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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,…

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