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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

15 Biketour photos that look like from a catalogue

Candid Abril 5, 2017 April 28, 2017

We just went through the photos from the past Biketours and discovered some that are so ridiculously photogenic that they could be from an advertisement!

Charging electronic devices in a sustainable way

Candid Março 30, 2017 April 28, 2017

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

luhukasu Fevereiro 10, 2017 April 28, 2017

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

Candid Fevereiro 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…