The biketour is an eco-mobile action community
Some 10 to 50 cyclists from different backgrounds – nationality, age, language, experience – cycle together, doing actions on their way and meet up with environmentally minded people and groups. They carry all equipment for camping on their bikes and trailers. It is a totally chaotic tour, with constantly changing sleeping places, group composition and food quality, but with some common things like: consensus based decision making, all tasks divided between the participants, a sleeping place every night and breakfast, lunch and dinner for a reasonable participation fee.

sleeping places
The basic BT sleeping place includes some space for tents. As nothing more is really needed, we made the experience that we can organize our sleeping places during the tour, during the day. This is nice sometimes – it strengthens the group feeling when people work together to find the place and to make up for its downsides.

Basic features which should not miss with any organized sleeping place are drinking water supply, a fire place to cook and wood in reach.

also appreciated by participants are hot showers/sauna, a lake/place to swim, toilets, a roof, a breakfast room, a kitchen equipped for big groups, some contact and exchange with locals, an action, internet facilities, information about the surroundings – bike shops, (eco)markets, where to get products from local farmers, tourist traps … Another type of sleeping place is schools and sport halls, which have quite some facilities.

food
The participants rotate the task of preparing a vegan or vegetarian breakfast, lunch and dinner. In our attempt to eat as local and organic food as possible we avoid big supermarkets with its highly packed and far travelled products. As the countries we are travelling through in 2010 are quite expensive, we would like to accept donations of food from farms, bakeries, shops or individuals. Thanks to the enormous wastage of food in these countries, if there are people interested in “reclaiming” food, dumpster-diving will also be a possible activity. Food that we would need to buy, we aim to get it at local markets, small shops or farmers we pass by. We travel with large pots for cooking, and in past years if we did not have access to a kitchen, usually we built a wood fire.

the route
We do prefer quiet asphalt roads in a beautiful scenery, slightly downhill. ~50 km per day. We do our best find them! A day with 30 km is very nice to fluff around and enjoy the not cycling sides of life. Do less on action days and none on resting days, where we should have 2 per week. A slow pace gives more time for the other nice things of biketour: to enjoy the surroundings, contact with local people, events and workshops. But still you might have to expect harder days – busy roads, 80 km, and some haste because some hosts are waiting…

consensus
We work with consensus based decision making – not the majority decides, but where everyone is included in the decisions. It has been our practice since the beginning, and we think that all decisions should be made by those people who the decision effects. But we do also know that none of us learned this in school and that there are certain human qualities which take care, that we will always have decision makers and people sitting quiet in the circle. Cultural and language barriers, human group behaviour, gender specific behaviour, highly motivated or very lazy people and the constantly changing group structure are standing against our try, but we think, it is important to train our communication and decision making skills and be patient during long morning circles, try new structures and experiment with the whole thing to live an alternative to what governments present as democracy.

eco-mobile …
With this tour we do set an example how to travel in an ecological sound way. We do not use any motorized vehicles, transport all our stuff on our bike or with our trailers. We will reduce our garbage as much as possible, reuse most of it and try to recycle the rest. We shop locally and organically produced stuff, cook with wook and eat vegetarian meals. Every participant comes with a different background to the tour, different ideas how to behave ecological. During the tour we will learn from each other, how to do that, and find out the do’s and dont’s. We consider it everyone’s personal decision to follow them, but we expect you to be open to listen to the reasons behind them and to strictly follow them, if you do something for the whole group.

…action community
This year’s theme is climate justice, and we will connect with local groups and projects, by whom we are being hosted. They show us their project, their campaigns or their nightlife and we might find a way to help them with our massive workforce, our positive motivated radiation, our ability to raise attention for a certain topic as an international biketour doing an action. On the one hand we see biketourists experiencing the host project, collecting ideas and get impressions of political realities, on the other hand the local group is visited by a cheerful crowd of open-minded foreign people, who bring some fresh wind and new ideas and tell of similar things happening at home.

organizing network
The tour is organised by an open network of old and new participants, there is no NGO or party behind us. We do have a strong connection to EYFA and WCN though. This is also a call to you to join organising efforts and to prepare stuff for the tour at home. There are people putting a shitload of work into this project, doing the international and national coordination, caring for hosts, sleepingplaces, actions, participants, infrastructure, info-material and funding. Visit help out to see how to support them. Find out about the next meeting, on-line or in real, where decisions are being taken and work distributed. And although it is not easy to get rid of them we try to reduce hierarchies by abolishing the difference between organisers and participants during the tour : everyone is an organiser !!

money

Biketour is a cheap way to travel. We calculated that the costs for this years´ Biketour will be around 8 Euro per person and day. But to make it more fair to people coming from a poor economic situation, we propose a daily fee of 10 eco per day.

The Eco is an alternative currency. One eco is equal to 1/1000 of your monthly income. For 2010, would like to have a minimum of 5 euros per person per day. Unfortunately it is more expensive than previous years because we are travelling through more expensive countries.

ie. if your monthly income is €1000/month, 10 ecos = 10 euros per day. If you are well-off enough to support some less wealthy person, you have the chance to give more, or less if you happen not to own much money. We won’t control anyone, so it’s really up to each of us to disucss what we think is fair. The most valuable things on biketour are the friendship and inspiration exchanged between participants and locals, so we really try to make sure money isn’t a barrier to join the Biketour so in the end we will always find a solution. If you think 5 euros is also too much, please talk with us.

Sometimes we are very lucky with funding, but generally we find enough funding for action materials – not for food, accomodation and visas, which is what the daily fee covers! However, we can ask farmers, bakeries and shop owners for (food) donations, so that in general the costs stay low. On the other hand there are really nice project on our way and we want to help them. Not only through the higher media interest, but if possible by leaving some money.

If you’d like to join our fundraising team for next year, please do!

conclusion
There is quite some magic happening around biketour, chaos everywhere, things not working out, being different than expected and a lot of improvisation. But in these rooms, this not organized part, which people have to cope with together, will be filled with the nicest minutes and be the time, when friendships grow. Leave place for creativity, BT itself cost a lot of time and energy per day, trust in the biketour ability to work things out together :]

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