What is the Ecotopia Biketour?
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. 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 are usually a group of 20-40 cyclists. Most people join for between 2 weeks and 2 months and are participating for the first time. We rarely cycle all together, some people go ahead in the morning and mark the route with arrows on the road. People then follow in small groups at their own speed and rhythm. We support each other and keep distances at a level that everybody and everybike can manage. Don’t worry if you have never travelled by bike before.
We have a set of core values (called Participation Guidelines) that include ecological sustainability, anti-oppression, veganism, skill-sharing, multi-linguality and consensus-based decision making.
We try to create a non-hierarchical environment by rotating responsibilities, sharing skills and respecting personal needs. People can sign up for daily tasks (cooking, pulling a trailer, marking the route, etc.), but everyone can decide individually how much they want to do. We gather as a group every few days to talk about how everything is going and to collectively make decisions. One of our core values is to create a non-discriminatory environment.
We cook communally with portable stoves, carry all our equipment ourselves, try to buy local and organic food; and we dumpster-dive where possible. We suggest a donation of 3–5 € per day to cover food costs, but people who cannot give this donation are also welcome to join.
If you have some questions or have recommendations for projects, groups and events for us to visit on the way or would like to help preparing the tour, please write us a mail or join our mailing list in our website.
Read about the Biketour History, about How We Organise and about our Core Values to get a better idea of how we roll!