Ecotopia – Tournon-sur-Rhône

The Bike Ride Over

On Saturday Ecotopia biked to a mid-point, and then on Sunday they biked to Tournon-sur-Rhône. Since I did not bike on Saturday, I completed the 90 km route on Sunday.

Via Rhôna

The route the I took was one of the EU bike routes. https://en.viarhona.com/ . The organisation that maintains that route has a lot of information about the history of the places that the route goes through and fun stuff to do eat and sleep along the way. The Tour de France is always in France, but the route varies each time. So some of the year include the route that I biked. The route followed the Rona river south. We took a short break at Vienna, France but other than that we biked all the way to Tournon-sur-Rhône.

For the most part the route was very pastoral with farms on very steep hills.

The Onion Festival

The location of out campsite was a cows grazing valley. Above the valley lived an old couple. The husband is an artist and let us stay in the valley for a few days. He even let us use the water and electricity from his art studio.

The host, and other locals then told us that after a 3-year hiatus, due to Corona, the city was having an onion festival the next day. The locals described the festival as incontournable, or in English, unmissable.

At the onion festival there were second hand markets, cheese and meet stands, fruit and vegetable stands, live birds and critters caged (presumably to slaughter and eat at home), food stands, a market for cheap goods, and of course a few stands for onions. Although, surprisingly there wasn’t that much of an emphasis on onions as I would have expected.

More About Ecotopia

While at the campsite, the more senior Ecotopians held a welcome meeting for all of the new people. One thing we quickly noticed was that about a third of everyone there was Israeli. There was my friend who told me about Ecotopia, my friend from Germany, my friend doing a year and a half long bike tour around the word, and me. In addition, there were two unrelated Israelis. I was expecting to go biking with a group of European anarchists, but I guess you can’t escape Israelis, even abroad.

At the welcome meeting the senior members explains the goals of Ecotopia; ecology, anti-capitalism, and modern gender theory. From what I understood historically it was only about ecology and anti-capitalism, but the third aspect got adapted later. Ecology is represented by doing green activities, like going on a bike tour and only eating vegan food. Anti-capitalism values are held by having communal meals, dumpster diving, and other activities that socialists do. The modern gender theory is expressed by explicitly inviting people of the FLINTA-LGBTQI+ community. FLINTA-LGBTQI+ stands for a lot of different gender identities and attractions, but in short, it includes everyone except guys who are not trans nor gay. In fact, this year, the first month of the tour explicitly excluded normal guys. While I was there, I noticed that there were quite a few trans people in the group. That was easy to notice, since Europeans are very comfortable going skinny-dipping.

During the welcome meeting they were very opened regarding the inner workings of Ecotopia. Since they are anarchists, they don’t want any members to be in charge of certain aspects, but rather for everyone to be able to participate equally.

The Ecotopia bike tour works by having a winter meeting where they decide which countries they will visit and more or less what the route will look like. Then, until the summer Ecotopians contact “projects” in that area and prepare a route around them. The projects are places that hold values similar to Ecotopia. for example, helping an organic farm, helping homeless people, helping places that produce clean energy (although presumably not nuclear).

I’m not sure exactly how Ecotopia attempts to achieve their goals. Although, from what I understood, they try to invite new people on every tour, and by visiting projects they can both spread their ideology and learn about other similar ones.

Advancing South

After spending a few days at Tournon-sur-Rhône, we packed up and started to head to our next destination, Saint-Laurent-du-Pape.