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

Chaos on the way to Puszcza Białoweża

Candid June 22, 2016 June 22, 2016

We have left Warsaw with 1½ days delay, on the 19th of June. We are about 7 people and everything is quite chaotic. Our application for a Belarus visa was not successful on the first attempt, so one of us stayed back in Warsaw to go to the embassy again. Every day they invented a new reason why our application is not complete, and everyday we had to talk to our contact in Belarus (who only speaks Russian, and we don’t) and go to the embassy again. On the first two days we only managed to do 30 km, as…

Warsaw kick off

ola June 18, 2016 September 8, 2016

Ecotopia 2016 has been inaugurated with a hell lot of pizza from a beautiful clay oven courtesy of ROD Warsaw, radical allotments collective. There are 9 of us at the moment. Getting a group visa for Belarus involves a lot of boureaucracy and it has been taking most of our time. There’s a lot to do here so we extended our stay by one day, until Sunday. Tomorrow we’re joining a women’s rights march here in Warsaw and then we’ll have a whole afternoon at Syrena social centre, getting to know about the struggle to save Puszcza Bialowieska and giving…

Pre-Biketour: Berlin–Poznań–Warszawa

Candid June 17, 2016 June 17, 2016

The 5th of June was the official start of the pre-Biketour in Berlin. Only 3 of us met (we expected much more) and joined the Fahrradsternfahrt, the biggest bicycle demonstration in the world, along with 140 000 other people. On 19 routes of around 1000 km in total, starting in different places around Berlin and all joining on the way to go to Brandenburger Tor in the centre, people are cycling in the whole city the whole day, including two of the city motorways. Outside of Berlin we quickly visited Kesselberg, a piece of forest outside of Berlin some people live…

Biketour in Helsinki (last year)

Candid June 17, 2016 June 17, 2016

The first two of us arrived on the 15th of September in Helsinki like planned, but only at 2 in the morning. In the end the 10 of us that remained arrived in about 6 groups spread over the next 4 days. Some people had decided to stay a bit longer in Tampere, but some wanted to arrive in Helsinki on time, so the group split in two. The first group split up on the last day when it got dark, as some wanted to make it to Helsinki, but some were too tired to cycle in the dark. The…