On entering Belgrade (8th September) we met up with some of the local Critical Mass crew along the Danube, led by a Serbian Biketour veteran, who showed us some of the problems for cyclists that are squeezed off the roads by heavy car and summer pedestrian traffic. Our mini Critical Mass ended on the outskirts of Belgrade, at the ex cinematography factory, now a thriving squatted social center where we were to be hosted called Inex Film. The huge building at Inex was once left abandoned, and squatted by various characters, latterly artists and activists who revived it from being…

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In  Novi Sad we met up with a film crew for the local Hungarian language TV, and here are the results! The first 7:30min relate to the Beyond Borders biketour: For those that don’t speak Hungarian, in the clip we talk about the history of Ecotopia Biketour, this year´s beyond borders theme, how we organise and also our route. Novi Sad is in the Vojvodina region, where there are several minority languages including Hungarian. In the clip they also mention the sections of our biketour which pass through other regions with Hungarian speaking minorities, such as the last leg of…

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The following day we followed the Danube all the way to Novi Sad just in time for the 3rd year anniversary event of CK13, a social centre for arts, culture and politics,  run voluntarily by some of our local hosts with a cafe, workshop spaces an anarchist info shop, and a regular people’s kitchen.  The evening’s theme was Veganism, Environmental Activism and Animal Rights. We watched a number of short films including Hrana za život (Food for Life) and Proždirući zemlju (Devour the Earth) and a speech by Phillip Wollen, subtitled in Serbian, on ‘Why animals should be off the…

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(Vimeo link) Check out this beautiful video made during our kick off days in Berlin by the wonderful Claudia! … Subtitles available in German / Untertitel jetzt auch auf Deutsch: Download here/hier! (Video von vimeo runterladen und auf Computer speichern. Dasselbe mit der Untertitel-Datei. Video mit VLC-Player öffnen. Untertiteldatei auswählen. Abspielen!)

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En route to Novi Sad we heard about the protests in Vukovar, (or Вуковар as the Serbian population would want it to be referred to) that had recently erupted over a longstanding dispute about minority language, that led to the newly erected Cyrillic signs being torn down from public buildings and three days of rallies and protests.*Protest image from this BBC News article. Since the 2011 census in Vukovar, it was recorded that the population of Serbians in the Croatian town had exceeded one third, which was the ‘legal’ requirement to have bilingual signs in both the Latin (Croatian), and…

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We left the common pastures of Croatia and again skirted the border between Croatia and Bosnia, finally crossing for a lunch spot at the border control point. Here an Italian man stopped to wish us well on our journey, only to then return 10 minutes later with a huge watermelon and bottles of fizzy pop; it was a warm welcome back to Bosnia. After the border crossing, the traces of the war became more and more apparent. Only too aware of the landmines that still contaminate the land, we were careful to find our camping spots either on recently made…

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Through a contact at Green Action Zagreb, our next destination was to meet activist fighting for the right to common pastures in Croatia. We made camp in their common field, and took a wash in the Sava – some of us even swimming across to Bosnia on the other side! The next morning we met some of the people who volunteer to keep the pastures alive and free for all. Gajna, an NGO and voluntary organisation founded in 2007, have been working to reserve the habitat of the land and keep it in use and free from industrial agriculture and…

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