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

what about ecotopia 2024??

Ecotopia Biketour March 20, 2024 March 22, 2024

—- hi everybody! —- after we kept getting questions about when and where ecotopia will happen this year, we realised that this info isn’t very visibly online yet. —- so here you go: we are going to the baltics, starting in southern finland and possibly ending in poland. so far we have fixed positive responses from a few projects but we’re actively working on it right now and we’re optimistic that there will be more answers soon! —- this is our very rough plan so far (please do not book tickets based on this!): —- towards end of june: starting…

challenging white ecotopia

Ecotopia Biketour March 12, 2024 March 12, 2024

dear ecotopians – especially dear black, brown, indigenous, asian and migrantized ecotopians, —- for a long time the ecotopia biketour has been quite the white environment and it mostly is that way still. this doesn’t mean that no BBIPoC or migrantized people have joined ecotopia in the past or have been/are part of the tour and orga, of course. but they have usually been a minority or even just a single person. some of our PoC friends feebacked that they were hesitant to join or didn’t come to the biketour because our group was so white. we would like to…

The brand new ✨Ecotopia Orga Month✨

Ecotopia Biketour February 20, 2024 February 20, 2024

dear everyone! —- we have some good news! some of us will meet next month for several weeks to do orga work like contacting projects, making a more concrete route, gathering equipment, creating tour info material, discussing topics like conflict resolution, awareness, the whiteness of ecotopia biketour and much more. we will meet where last year’s tour started, in austria with some sweet friends of ecotopia. <3 —- wanna join us? anyone can come! but we ask you to tell us beforehand when and for how long you’d like to join us because the place has limited capacities. we’ll then…

Ecotopia?? Tell us what you think about our name

anonymous February 5, 2024 February 5, 2024

Ecotopia?? One of the topics that came up during the meeting in December 2023 was about the name of the biketour. More specifically, if we want to change it. The name has a lot of history – it was first used as a name of a bus tour and later gathering from many years ago, starting in 1986, then a biketour was attached to the gathering in 1990, and then the gathering stopped happening in 2008, and since then there is just the biketour! This isn’t the first time we have discussed the idea of changing the name. It has…