2015 – Page 5 – Ecotopia Biketour

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Jönköping – hot showers, chocolate cake, and other bike tourers

Ecotopia Biketour 2015 July 26, 2015 September 2, 2015

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…

Uddebo Village – alternative living in the countryside

Ecotopia Biketour 2015 July 26, 2015 September 2, 2015

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…

We reach Göteborg

Ecotopia Biketour 2015 July 25, 2015 September 2, 2015

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…

The forest garden and cycling to Göteborg

Ecotopia Biketour 2015 July 25, 2015 September 2, 2015

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…

Malmö

Ecotopia Biketour 2015 July 25, 2015 September 2, 2015

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 –…

The Bike Tour in Copenhagen

Candid July 25, 2015 February 22, 2016

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…

Biketour in Makvärket

Candid July 24, 2015 December 2, 2015

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,…

Preparing a Biketour

Candid June 27, 2015 September 2, 2015

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…