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

Biketour-Shortfilm #2 – EVERYDAY LIVE

luhukasu February 10, 2017 April 28, 2017

But also we realised, that so far, filming wasn’t considered in our photosharing-concept. For some people it is a big difference whether they are filmed and then appear online or if it’s just photos of them. So we added another option about filming to the sheet, that is passed around during the tour.

How to get a group of cyclists into Belarus

Candid February 9, 2017 April 28, 2017

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…

Biketour-Shortfilm #1 – GRAVEL

luhukasu February 8, 2017 April 28, 2017

During 2016s tour some of us made some film-recordings. We collected all of the footage and I(Lukas) cut some short clips. We then realised, that there are quiet a lot films about the biketour online and started a Ecotopia Group on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/194684480

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

Candid December 30, 2016 April 28, 2017

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: