Life’s a beach: on the Méhari safari
You don’t drive a Citroën Méhari. You pootle in one. Driving gets you from A to B, but a Méhari gets you from sea to sea – from one side of the island to the other, perhaps; from beach to beach; from wife to wife. In a Citroën Méhari, the world is not your oyster; the oyster is your oyster. Who wants the world anyway? Have you seen the world lately? In Cap Ferret, the tiny French resort town where the Méhari has really found its spiritual home, the regulars are quite content with the seafood alone, thanks. I once saw a man driving his beach buggy down a dusty lane towards his cabin, a platter of open, iced oysters balancing on his upturned hand, a 400-year-old sighthound lolling in the flatbed.
You can’t talk about the Citroën Méhari without talking about Cap Ferret, and you can’t really talk about Cap Ferret without talking about the Citroën Méhari. The town itself is sprawled over a dangling spit of sand off the Atlantic coast of France, and it’s best seen as a final bastion of an old, near-obsolete, vestigial way of chic holidaymaking – very much the happy appendix of the nation. It is basically the South of France without all the basic South of France stuff. The South of France as it once was; the South of France if it wasn’t quite so ghastly. There are two restaurants in the town (there are several more, but really there are only two) and 10 oyster shacks that serve six types of oyster in three sizes and one bottle of white wine. (You can also get whelks and bread and cold butter if you like. They do good sausages for the children and the dogs.)
Smart Parisian families take a cabin here for a month each summer – timber frames, hand-painted signs, 50 shades of white. Mostly, though, they inherit them, along with a metric tonne of sand hidden in the sofa and a cabinet full of faded board games and tattered nautical maps. The easiest way to own a house on Cap Ferret, the old joke goes, is to invent a time machine, go back 60 years, and convince your grandfather to buy a house in Cap Ferret. Americans have the same line about getting an internship at Goldman Sachs, I’m told. Priorities.
The regulars here – not the locals, there is really no such thing – have never heard an English accent they admire, much less an American one. You can’t build anything over three storeys on the spit. In fact, you can’t really build anything here at all, at least not without the sign-off of a grumpy cabal of residents and grandees, who barely approve a garden shed without much debate, huffing and eating subsidised charcuterie on the table. (What would one need a swimming pool for? We have God’s swimming pool all around us.)
Cut off from the Mediterranean by the comforting rump of Spain – it can be so useful, sometimes, as a country – Cap Ferret fears no incursions from the giant white fridges that float ominously off the coast of Porto Cervo, Ramatuelle and elsewhere nowadays, their red mast lights blinking like demon eyes in the dawn, their owners always wanting something or doing something or trying to be something else. Can’t people just sit still?
In this peculiar and lovely environment, where everyone has enough money that they look like they don’t (and so, in the circular logic of snobbery, you can tell that they do), a sports car is definitely not the thing. The potholes alone would do for a low-slung Ferrari. Anyone can own a Lamborghini or a G-Wagen. All these cars tell us is that you’re rich, which is an awful thing to tell anyone. But a Méhari tells a different story. It’s a thing of authenticity, of function, of rugged simplicity (it was first designed as a lightweight, easy-to-fix desert wagon during the Second World War) and an old-fashioned, lost ease. You hope that your supercar says, “I’ve arrived!” The Méhari says, “I have returned with the morning pastries.”
I go to Cap Ferret nearly every summer, and every day when I am there, I pull over on my bike several times and take a quick shot on my camera of a Méhari I haven’t seen before. (The endless modular customisability of the buggy means every owner’s car looks different to the others – perhaps some blue flap doors set against the white frame after an old encounter with a bollard; perhaps a faded striped awning in a unique shade of yellow; perhaps a towelling bench at the back to soak up all the Labrador; perhaps a bumper sticker from a tennis tournament in 1998.)
The friends I’m with at the time might stop and wait at the crossroads ahead, or huff a little at the corner of the lane down towards the bar, and ask why I’m taking another photo of some old car for the fourteenth time that day. “You don’t even really like cars,” they’ll say. Which is, I tell them, exactly why I like the Citroën Méhari.
Want more car content? Check out Polestar’s Arctic Circle drives…
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