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

Beyond Borders: On film in Hungarian

agnessiob September 9, 2013 March 3, 2017

In Novi Sad we met up with a film crew for the local Hungarian language TV, and here are the results! The first 7:30min relate to the Beyond Borders biketour: For those that don’t speak Hungarian, in the clip we talk about the history of Ecotopia Biketour, this year´s beyond borders theme, how we organise and also our route. Novi Sad is in the Vojvodina region, where there are several minority languages including Hungarian. In the clip they also mention the sections of our biketour which pass through other regions with Hungarian speaking minorities, such as the last leg of…

Anti Car Dogs, Military Tunnels and Serbian TV… Biketour in Novi Sad

kate September 7, 2013 October 27, 2013

The following day we followed the Danube all the way to Novi Sad just in time for the 3rd year anniversary event of CK13, a social centre for arts, culture and politics, run voluntarily by some of our local hosts with a cafe, workshop spaces an anarchist info shop, and a regular people’s kitchen. The evening’s theme was Veganism, Environmental Activism and Animal Rights. We watched a number of short films including Hrana za život (Food for Life) and Proždirući zemlju (Devour the Earth) and a speech by Phillip Wollen, subtitled in Serbian, on ‘Why animals should be off the…

Ecotopia Biketour Beyond Borders Video

kate September 6, 2013 March 3, 2017

(Vimeo link) Check out this beautiful video made during our kick off days in Berlin by the wonderful Claudia! … Subtitles available in German / Untertitel jetzt auch auf Deutsch: Download here/hier! (Video von vimeo runterladen und auf Computer speichern. Dasselbe mit der Untertitel-Datei. Video mit VLC-Player öffnen. Untertiteldatei auswählen. Abspielen!)

Vukovar’s alphabet wars are all in the signs

kate September 4, 2013 November 10, 2013

En route to Novi Sad we heard about the protests in Vukovar, (or Вуковар as the Serbian population would want it to be referred to) that had recently erupted over a longstanding dispute about minority language, that led to the newly erected Cyrillic signs being torn down from public buildings and three days of rallies and protests.*Protest image from this BBC News article. Since the 2011 census in Vukovar, it was recorded that the population of Serbians in the Croatian town had exceeded one third, which was the ‘legal’ requirement to have bilingual signs in both the Latin (Croatian), and…