About

Ecotopia Biketour is a self-organized, international community that has been organizing a yearly bicycle tour in different regions of Europe since 1990. During the tour we visit environmental and social projects and practice forms of activism and sustainable living. We cook communal vegan food, practice consensus decision making, and share skills by doing workshops. One of our core values is to create a non-discriminatory environment. Participants are asked to give a voluntary contribution of 3–5 € per day to cover food costs, but if you cannot afford this you are welcome to join for free! Ecotopia Biketour is for anyone interested in travelling by bike, community life, DIY, an ecological lifestyle, and/or learning by experience. If this sounds good to you, feel welcome to join us!

We try to make the tour as inclusive as possible for any level of fitness or experience with bike touring. We cycle a maximum of 30–70 km per day (depending on the hills), and on average half of the days we stay in a place without cycling. Our experience is that almost everyone can manage this, but there is the possibility to shorten the distances if we discover that it is too much. People cycle in small groups or alone, at whatever speed suits them, and many people like to take it slow and take lots of breaks. A detailed route plan for the day is shared in the morning, arrows are drawn with chalk on the road at every turn, and if you get lost you can always call the Biketour phone. If you have a shitty bike, you will not be the only one, and we enjoy supporting each other if something breaks. We make sure that the last people to leave carry a toolbox, a phone and a first-aid kit in order to assist if anything goes wrong on the road.

Read more about what the Ecotopia Biketour is. If you would like to get an insight into the organisation or just ask a question, contact us.

Biketour concepts

Participation Guidelines

Because we all have different visions of life and diverse personalities, Ecotopia Biketour has developed a set of basic values which helps all of us to create similar expectations from this project.
> participation guidelines
> awareness

Self-Organisation

As we oppose any leadership or hierachical structures, the Biketour is organised in an open way where everyone can be a part of.
> how it’s prepared
> consensus
> circles

Online Tools

We try to use free and open-source software as much as possible in the preparation process. The same goes for sharing photos and videos in the group.
> online-tools
> photo-sharing

On the road

Everyone should be able to cycle with the Biketour. Therefore we keep distances low and have scouts going ahead who mark the route. Everyone can follow the signs on their own level of speed. Any tasks like scouting, cooking or pulling a trailer are shared.
> on the road
> tasks & rota
> trailers
> wildcamping

Food

All communal food on Biketour is vegan and cooked with wood on our mobile rocket stove.
Whenever it’s possible we go dumpster-diving and buy food from local farmers and small shops.
> veganism
> rocket stove
> dumpster-diving

Activities

We plan and make many activities on the tour: skill-sharing, helping at projects, joining actions and protests, bike-fixing and other events.
> skill-sharing

Latest blog posts

campfires, sandpits, cow pastures and swamps

Ecotopia Biketour 2016 July 3, 2016 July 3, 2016

Finally the group somehow has improved its routine. Cycling, cooking and camping is working. We where so occupied with the visa for belarus that we hardly could organize our daily tasks… But we found nice sleeping places every night and we cycled through very beautiful landscapes. Especially the area around the Bug was nice. In the tiny villages, every house has a bench in front, where the people hang out and meet each other. We are always a big attraction cycling through. The dogs running after us, barking, and then suddendly jumping back when Knoedel, the biketour-dog barks back.

This year’s theme

ola July 2, 2016 April 28, 2017

It seems like trying to live in a sustainable way in a mobile community we constantly find ourselves reusing other people’s trash. We can’t grow our own but we try to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible, finding alternatives to buying new. Obviously, Western European trash is very different from the trash we see in the east of the continent. Last year in Scandinavia we were able to source nearly all of our food (and even clothes and shoes!) from supermarket food skips without much effort. We had a dumpster diving team on the rota every day and…

The Rocketstove

Ecotopia Biketour 2016 June 26, 2016 April 28, 2017

“Kraft Automotive” (Force Carmotivs) – is written on the barrel out of which the 2016’s Rocketstove is made. It was built in the Radical Allotment Gardens in Warsaw in the first days of the biketour. Built out of Trash that the R.O.D – people had collected. We could use all of their stuff, they had that barrel and some leftover ovenpipes. They hat even some of that alluminium-tape which is made for exactly that purpose. Actually we only had to buy the special insulation material required called Perlite. It is some vulcanic stone material, natural and very light. So what…

Chaos on the way to Puszcza Białoweża

Candid June 22, 2016 June 22, 2016

We have left Warsaw with 1½ days delay, on the 19th of June. We are about 7 people and everything is quite chaotic. Our application for a Belarus visa was not successful on the first attempt, so one of us stayed back in Warsaw to go to the embassy again. Every day they invented a new reason why our application is not complete, and everyday we had to talk to our contact in Belarus (who only speaks Russian, and we don’t) and go to the embassy again. On the first two days we only managed to do 30 km, as…