We strongly discourage travelling to the Biketour by airplane for environmental reasons. Most people arrive by train, bus or by bicycle. Travelling by public transportation across different countries usually requires a lot of complicated research, especially when you want to take a bike with you. This page can be a starting point for your research. However, listing all the options to travel cheaply to the Biketour from anywhere in Europe would be beyond the scope of this page. If you would like some support to find the best option to join the Biketour from your specific location, feel free to contact us.
Getting to Sweden/Norway
Ecotopia Biketour 2026 will happen mostly in Sweden, with the last part in Norway. For participants from most parts of Europe and beyond, this means crossing the sea to get there:
- Long-distance buses are often a cheap option that offer direct connections between far away places. To Sweden, buses take a ferry or the bridge and can sometimes even be cheaper than the ticket for the ferry would be for just a person+bike. However, few bus lines officially offer to take a bike. Often it is possible to take a disassembled bike as oversized luggage, but that requires the effort to disassemble it, often involves an extra fee, and sometimes gets rejected on the spot because the luggage compartment is too full, so it can be an unreliable option. Also, if you travel with small children, you usually have to bring a car seat for them. Taking animals on buses is usually not possible.
- Trains are usually the fastest and most environmentally friendly (apart from cycling) option. They usually don’t have a limit on the amount of luggage. Many trains accept bikes, usually for a fee. Taking a disassembled bike as regular luggage is always possible. However, trains are usually very expensive, especially when booked short term. Also, travelling long distance by train usually requires a lot of research, different tickets from different train operators, several to many changes along the way with the risk of one delay making your further tickets invalid, and unpredictable situations regarding the accessibility of train stations and trains with a bicycle and luggage. When travelling by train with a lot of luggage on your bicycle and/or with children, it is strongly advisable to be a group of at least 2 or 3 people.
- Ferries allow getting from mainland Europe to Sweden/Norway. They are usually convenient for bikes with luggage, as you can simply ride on without even having to take off the luggage. There can be huge price differences between different lines and sometimes different operators on the same line. Long ferry lines that take longer than maybe half a day usually require booking a cabin, which leads to much higher prices. The requirements for bringing animals on ferries differ a lot, on many lines the animal has to stay on the bike alone. Taking a ferry is usually combined with taking a train or riding the bicycle to/from the ferry. Not all ferry ports have a train connection, so a bit of cycling might be required.
- Ride-shares (like BlaBlaCar) can sometimes be an option. Some people are travelling with vans or motorhomes that have enough space for a bike and the luggage. Bringing animals is often possible. It can be difficult to find such rides and you will have to check many combinations of cities, but they can be a cheap and convenient option to do a large segment of the way at once. It can also be worth to ask around in online communities of people living in vans.
- Hitchbiking works better than you would think, but usually involves a lot of time and patience. Vans, motorhomes, trucks and cars with trailers will be able to take you and your bike. There are even stories of people hitchbiking with a river boat for several days. Hitchbiking at ferry ports can be a way to take ferries for free if the line doesn’t charge for the amount of passengers. Often, trucks have two people included in their ticket, so they are willing to take you across if they are travelling alone.
- Cycling parts or all of the way is of course an option that can be considered as well.
By bus
Busradar is a website where you can find long-distance bus connections from different companies. A good starting point to find out which bus stations exist along the route of the Biketour is the FlixBus map (if you zoom in, it shows more stations. Also, if you click on a station, you can see the FlixBus connections from there). The major relevant stations along the route are Stockholm, Norrköping, Linköping, Jönkoping, Göteborg and Oslo, depending where you join. You may be able to find a connection to a smaller, more local station, but that usually involves changing at one of the major stations anyways, so it is worth to check other local transport options as well.
As far as we are aware, FlixBus is the only long-distance bus provider that carries bicycles. However, this only applies to some of its lines. The way to find out seems to be to search for a connection on the FlixBus website and specify a bike in the list of passengers. If a connection then says “No bike slots”, it means that this line doesn’t carry bikes. Those that do usually have a bus rack on the back of the bus where you put your bike without luggage (lock it, as bikes can be stolen when the bus is waiting somewhere). Bring a large bag to put the rest of your luggage in, as some bus drivers can be strict that you only have one piece of luggage.
Some specific relevant FlixBus connections that carry bikes are: Hamburg–Stockholm, Berlin–Stockholm (both via Jönköping, Linköping, Norrköping), Hamburg–Oslo, Berlin–Oslo (both via Göteborg). In general it is hard to find out details about specific FlixBus connections, so you need to try around with various options on your specific route.
Other bus companies might accept bikes as oversize luggage if they are disassembled and packed in a bag. However, every company has a different policy, and often it’s the individual decision of the bus driver regardless of the company policy.
By train
Getting by train to Sweden usually involves taking a long-distance train to Copenhagen via Hamburg and changing trains there, since there are no direct international trains to Sweden. An exception is the SJ night train Berlin–Hamburg–Stockholm, but that does not accept bikes.
From Copenhagen you can take the Øresundståg train to Sweden. See Getting around in Sweden/Norway below for more details, since it is quite complicated.
By ferry
To be written
Getting around in Sweden/Norway
Taking public transportation with a bike around Sweden is surprisingly and exceptionally complicated. Long-distance trains by the national train operator SJ generally do not accept bikes. Most, but not all regional trains accept bikes, but each line is operated by a different company with a different policy. For example, taking regional trains from Copenhagen to Stockholm involves 6 different trains from 5 different companies, and separate research is required about whether each line accepts bikes. Whenever possible, FlixBus is usually a much better option, see By bus above for details how to book it. Unfortunately, it seems like only the international FixBus connections from Berlin/Hamburg to Stockholm/Oslo accept bikes, but not the national connections within Sweden.
A good starting point would be to find out which train stations are close to where you want to join the Biketour. For this you can use the public transportation map on FacilMap. The black lines are train lines, and if you zoom in, you can see all the stations and fine the one closest to where you want to join the tour. If you want to know a prediction where the tour will be on a specific day, please contact us.
Then, Deutsche Bahn can be a good starting point for finding a connection. One detail to keep in mind: The letter “å” is replaced by “aa” on Deutsche Bahn (if you want to join in Borås for example, it is called Boraas on Deutsche Bahn; entering Boras will not find it). After entering the start and destination, a button “Mode of transport” appears under the form. When you click it, you can select “Local transport only” at the top to only search for regional trains. Note that the form has an option to search for trains that accept bicycles, but in Sweden this does not seem to work, since most trains that do accept bikes are listed as not accepting bikes. After searching for the connection, click on the “Operator” button to see which company runs the train. Then you can search for the website of that operator and research there whether it accepts bikes and what the ticket costs. Unfortunately, the operator is not listed for all train lines. One way to find out seems to be to search for the train number on https://tågstationen.se/tåg/<number>/, for example for train number 18872 on https://tågstationen.se/tåg/18872/. There you can find the name of the train/operator for further research.
Once you have picked a connection, separate tickets can be booked from each operator along the way for its section. This means that if you miss a connection because a train is late or the station is built so inaccessibly that you cannot change platforms on time, your further tickets would probably be worthless. It seems that regional train tickets in Sweden are usually fixed price, meaning that there is no price difference to book them one month in advance or one hour. You can check this for a specific operator by checking one connection now and one in one month and see if the prices differ. For fixed-price connections it usually makes the most sense to book them once you are at the station of departure (at the machine or online), since then you know you will make the next train.