Author: Candid

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…

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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…

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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…

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On the 11th of September, we arrived in Tampere. Our sleeping place was the social and art centre Hirvitalo. Tampere is a city surrounded by lakes, and on one of them, really close to Hirvitalo, some people had built a floating sauna with a glass roof from which you can see across the lake. The highlight was when we saw the northern lights over the lake while having a sauna. There was not much programme in Tampere. On the way to Tampere we slept next to a really freaky sculpture park in the middle of a forest. Some of us…

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On the 4th of September, we arrived in Turku. Our main base was Pyöräpaja Vapaa Ratas, a bike workshop that sells old bike parts and fixed-up bikes on a regular bike flea market (from the money, the rent is paid) and where people can also come to fix their bikes or have them fixed. It is in Aurinkotehdas, an old bicycle factory that is now used for different social projects, such as an Emmaus second-hand shop. We were really warmly welcomed, and many people had heard from or even participated in the Biketour that cycled to the Ecotopia Gathering close…

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From the 31st of August to the 2nd of September, the Biketour stayed at Livonsaari, a small village about 40 km west of Turku. In Livonsaari, many people try to live together in a more ecological and communal way. There are many different initiatives by different individuals in the village, such as a baker baking organic bread from locally produced wheat, someone building sustainable houses with a special technique using big logs, a community garden, and many people building their houses themselves out of wood. We helped the people in the village to dig some holes and so some garden…

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After Stockholm, at the end of August 2015, we cycled north towards Kapellskär to ferry-hop towards Turku across the Åland archipelago. The Åland archipelago is a collections of literally hundreds of thousands of islands in the Baltic Sea between the Swedish and Finnish mainland, and it is known for its exceptionally beautiful landscape. Åland belongs to Finland, but its official language is Swedish. Only people who have family there are allowed to move there to not overcrowd it, and transit traffic is discouraged, so it doesn’t feel very touristic and there is a lot of space, nature and quietness. It…

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On the Biketour, all common meals and all things bought by communal money are vegan. This means that they should not contain neither any animals (meat, fish, chicken, gelatine, shrimps, lobsters, carmine, leather, etc.) nor any products produced by animals (milk, eggs, honey, bee’s wax, wool). On the last tour, in Broddetorp in the end of July 2015, we did a workshop about this topic. In case you are wondering why the Biketour is vegan and what veganism has to with environmental and social justice, here is a summary of what we talked about in the workshop, an overview over the…

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