Candid – Page 7 – Ecotopia Biketour

Links #3: Painted ponies, tree house elevator, smog in China, AlterTour, Bike Travelling Festival

Candid December 24, 2015 December 22, 2015

Bad Drivers Are Forcing an English Town to Paint Its Ponies Bicycle Powered Tree House Elevator Company Selling ‘Bottled Air’ Sells Out in 4 Days as China’s Smog Crisis Deepens AlterTour, a bicycle tour similar to Ecotopia, have announced their route for 2016: They will cycle from 10 July to 21 August in the north-west of France, starting at la ZAD and visiting many interesting projects on the way. On the weekend of the 16 and 17 January, there will be the International Festival of Travelling by Bike in Paris, France. The event seems to take place in French. While mostly…

Biketour in Oslo

Candid December 20, 2015 December 20, 2015

In the beginning of August, the Biketour stayed in Oslo for 4 full days. It was half-time for the tour, and more than half of the group left, but the same amount of people joined. We stayed at Blitzhuset, a famous anti-fascist squat and social centre. Blitzhuset is open as a volunteer-run vegan café almost every day, and the money earned is donated to political groups in different parts of the world. There is also a big hall with a stage where concerts happen almost every week (outside of the summer holidays). The upper floors are used for different projects such as…

Cycling to Oslo

Candid December 16, 2015 December 16, 2015

After Kampetorp, the Biketour took three days to cycle to Oslo. Entering Norway, things were as different as you could possibly imagine. The part of Sweden that we had previously cycled in was full of forest, with not many people or cars around, and people seemed to live in some kind of unrealistic idyllic dream, where no matter what happens, everyone will always be friendly to each other. Norway seemed to be the opposite – suddenly the roads were so packed of (new and shiny) cars that cycling got much slower, there were people everywhere, one supermarket after each other,…

Biketour in Kampetorp

Candid December 12, 2015 April 10, 2016

At the end of July, the Biketour stayed for two days at Kampetorp, an eco-village in Sweden really close to the southern border of Norway. Getting there was a nightmare – steep gravel roads at about 10°C and heavy rain. But when we arrived we were welcomed to stay in a cosy little red house heated by a fire stove. Kampetorp is a clearing in the middle of the forest where a group of (about 10?) young people have started to live in a communal and sustainable way. People live mostly as families in their own houses, and there is not…

Wildcamping in Sweden – with hot showers and a sauna

Candid December 8, 2015 December 8, 2015

On the way from Broddetorp to Loo Östang, the scouts had difficulties finding a good sleeping spot. In the end they chose a lawn next to a football pitch just outside a village. No one was around to ask whether it’s a good idea to camp there, and our Biketour experience tells us that wild-camping really close to a village without asking for permission is normally not a very good idea, and football pitches in particular are not the kind of places the most open to strangers, so we were already expecting that we would be told to leave the…

Biketour in Broddetorp

Candid December 4, 2015 December 2, 2015

Broddetorp is a small village of about 140 inhabitants somewhere between Vättern and Vänern, the two big lakes of Sweden. The Biketour spent the night from the 22nd to the 23rd of July there. Broddetorp got our attention when we were looking for anti-mining groups in the area (there is a lot of uranium and rare earth mining projects going on in that region). We found a group called Nej till Uranbrytning and got in contact with their member Birgitta. A coincidence for such a small village, it turned out that a former participant of the Biketour also lives there. Birgitta was very…

Biketour visiting JAK member’s bank

Candid December 2, 2015 December 2, 2015

On the 22nd of July, Biketour passed by Skövde on the way from Bossgården to Broddetorp. Skövde is a small town of 35 000 inhabitants somewhere in the middle between Vättern and Vänern, the two big lakes of Sweden. It happens to be the place where JAK Medlemsbank, a members-owned alternative bank, was founded in 1965 based on the concept of JAK Denmark, which has existed since 1931. Knowing some alternative banks from other countries, which are a part of the capitalist system just like any other bank, except that they invest their money into more social and sustainable projects, it seemed…

Links #2 – Vio.Me blockade, COP21, bicycle repair man

Candid November 30, 2015 December 16, 2015

Vio.Me successfully blocked and postponed the auction where the factory is supposed to be sold. Vio.Me is a soap factory in Thessaloniki that was squatted by its workers in 2011 and has since been run as a cooperatively and democratically self-organised organic soap factory. We were there with the Biketour in 2014. In Paris, the COP21 (the 21st Climate Change conference of the UN) has started. It will officially last until the 11th of December (but is expected to last longer, like the previous conferences). France already announced in the beginning of November to close its borders in prospect of hundreds of thousands…