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About

Przepraszamy, ten wpis jest dostępny tylko w języku English, Castellano, Català, Česky, Deutsch i Français. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in this site default language. You may click one of the links to switch the site language to another available language.

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

Przepraszamy, ten wpis jest dostępny tylko w języku English i Castellano. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in this site default language. You may click one of the links to switch the site language to another available language.

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

Picking a circuit for the dynamo-powered USB port, part 2

Candid 9 lipca, 2017 August 14, 2017

Ecotopia Biketour 2017 is already under way and updates about how our first days of cycling went will follow soon. One thing that we want to achieve this year is not rely on the electrical sockets of our hosts anymore when it comes to charging the numerous electronic devices that people are bringing on the tour these days. One way to do that is to build a circuit that converts the power coming out of the dynamo of a bike to power that is needed to run a USB port. We have tried to find the best way to build…

Collaborative map tool FacilMap & How we chose the region

luhukasu 15 czerwca, 2017 June 20, 2017

Collaborative opensource map tool For the planning of the Biketour, we have an online tool, an interactive, editable map where we can all work together. Anybody who’s been organising this tour can add projects, nice places, interesting events and other relevant things. You can switch on and off marker types and routes you want to look at on the right side of the map. If you click on a marker or a line, it shows you more information like descriptions, contact-details and for routes the elevation profile. Because it’s openly published, this map is a non-editable version of the map. For the…

Traffic

luhukasu 11 maja, 2017 May 11, 2017

In this short film the Biketour cycles through Minsk in Belarus, where it is forbidden to ride your bike on the road! Mixed up with the different curiosities that crossed our way, such as a youth-brass-band on the beach or a bison in the polish forest.

Spring meeting 2017

Candid 10 maja, 2017 June 12, 2017

Eleven of us (plus two dogs) met on the week-end from the 14th to the 16th of April in Freiburg, Germany, to work on the preparation of the upcoming Biketour. The venue was the public café of the housing cooperative SUSI. SUSI is several former military barracks that were bought by a collective using the Mietshäusersyndikat, and association that makes it easier to get a loan for buying houses collectively, while at the same time making sure that these houses can never enter the capitalist real estate market again. The complex is huge, with space for 285 people to live and…