Ecotopia Biketour is a self-organised, international community that has been organizing an annual 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 traveling by bike, community life, DIY, an ecological lifestyle, and/or learning by experience. If this sounds good to you, feel welcome to join us!
The start of the tour (the first 3 weeks, 3rd to 24th July) will be reserved for LGBTQIA+ and FLINTA . Please see more about this below.
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 attempt for 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 in a circle every few days to talk about how everything is going and to collectively make decisions. We aim to create a non-discriminatory environment, where discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation, class, race, age, ability or religion is not tolerated.
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.
In 2022 we will be cycling for 3 months in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. We will start on the 3rd of July in Amsterdam with one week of preparation camp. Then we cycle south towards Marseille and spend the last weeks along one of the most beautiful coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. A detailed plan with what projects and festivals we'll visit can be found on our website.
As mentioned above, the beginning of the tour (3rd to 24th July) will be a tour for FLINTA and LGBTQIA+, while hetero cis men are asked not to join this part of the tour. This way we hope to achieve a fun and empowering Biketour experience that avoids one-sided cis hetero masculinity. Also the idea is to develop the collective to make it more equally organised and inclusive towards people of different gender identities and sexual orientations, instead of the imbalance in favour of hetero cis men, which has been a pattern on the tour and the orga the last years.
To explain the abbreviations: FLINTA stands for Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Transgender and Agender. LGBTQIA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and those whose identity and orientation is not accurately captured by those mentioned before (+).
If you want to join us, find more details and a registration form on our website. 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 to info@ecotopiabiketour.net or join our mailing list on our website.
We hope to see you on the tour :)
The Ecotopia Biketour Collective https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/