About
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
> participation guidelines
> awareness
Self-Organisation
> how it’s prepared
> consensus
> circles
Online Tools
> online-tools
> photo-sharing
On the road
> on the road
> tasks & rota
> trailers
> wildcamping
Food
Whenever it’s possible we go dumpster-diving and buy food from local farmers and small shops.
> veganism
> rocket stove
> dumpster-diving
Activities
> skill-sharing
Latest blog posts
Charging electronic devices in a sustainable way
On the Biketour in 2015, one very noticeable change compared to the Biketours before was that suddenly many people came with a smartphone. In the years before there had been maybe one or two people among a group of up to 50 who had a GPS or smartphone with them, but now there were even some days where no one followed the route of the scouts, because in every small group of cyclists, there was at least one who was using GPS navigation on their phone. One side-effect was that people needed to charge their phones all the time, and whenever…
Biketour-Shortfilm #2 — EVERYDAY LIVE
Извините, этот техт доступен только в “English”, “Български”, “Castellano”, “Català”, “Deutsch” и “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.
https://vimeo.com/199732250
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
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
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.