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

Kaunas=Carmass

luhukasu August 26, 2016 August 27, 2016

We met quite a bunch of nice alternative minded people on the Sapfo-Festival. Most of them didn’t even understand the concept of travelling by bike. How can you carry all the stuff that you need? The festival happened 45km far from Kaunas where many people who joined the festival live. Only two of them arrived by bike. In Kaunas, lets better call it Carmass, cycling was really horrible. Everywhere, there are 4- or 6-lane roads filled up with cars. Sometimes a bike-path goes along but it is normally so bumpy that it’s uncycleable if you are not riding a mountainbike.…

Cita Abra, el viejo molino

Ecotopia Biketour 2016 August 14, 2016 August 26, 2016

Cita Abra es un proyecto naciente, es un molino de agua en construcción, en reconstrucción, en transformación… su estructura y su infra permiten albergar actividades y gente: grupos, compañías, colectivos, y biketours :) Por él fluye el agua, generando energía, lo que explica las incontables lámparas encendidas que nos esperaban en cada uno de esos oscuros y espaciosos cuartos de gruesos muros. (Mi favorita es la del baño, que misteriosamente siempre está desocupado cuando lo necesito, a pesar de que somos 14 ahora: el exacto doble de lxs que fuimos en Bielorusia). Cita Abra nació en…

Klaipeda – Liepaja / Radi Vidi Pats

Ecotopia Biketour 2016 August 13, 2016 August 29, 2016

Hello bike tour blog followers, this is Jacob typing. I joined the group a few days ago in Palanga. What follows is an account of my first few days cycling with the bike tour. After the stress of hauling a bike across Europe finding three scruffy looking cyclists stood by some trees in Palanga was a joy and the question ‘shall we cycle’ only had one answer. We cycled northwards along a bike path heading to the Latvian border. The path teemed with holiday goers on rented bikes or rolling skates. The absence of cars and presence of sun made…

The Curonian Spit

CharlieCharlie August 10, 2016 April 28, 2017

From Kaunas, the biketour cycled for 5 days to reach the Curonian Spit, a long piece of land that starts in Kaliningrad (Russia) and streches for 100km in the ocean next to Lithuania, where you have to get a ferry back to Klaipeda on mainland Lithuania. We took the ferry to Nida (again, some kind of a puzzle in which we had to fit 14 bikes, 3 trailers, and tons of luggage into a small space…), the most southern part that belongs to Lithuania, and cycled north from here. The spit is a protected area of land and a UNESCO…