The Marou-mobile (part 1: the Honey Moon)

The end of 2011 was a hectic time for the Marou Team, but among the trips to the countryside to buy cacao and chocolate deliveries we took a little time to go buy our first vehicle: a 1970s Citroen La Dalat, a car that not unlike Marou Chocolate was made in Vietnam using French technology!

A La Dalat looks just like a Citroen Mehari with a metal body instead of a plastic one. If you have no idea what a Mehari is let’s just put it that way: it’s the simplest, most rustic, lightest, 4-wheel utility vehicle you could conceive, powered by a 600cc air-cooled flat twin and sharing all the mechanical components of the post-war Citroen workhorse: the 2CV. Instead of the gentle curves of the 2CV, all the body panels of La Dalat are made of flat metal sheets, which can and in Vietnam very often are fixed by the village’s blacksmith, giving it a distinctive Le Corbusier-meets-the-Flintstones look.

La Dalats are by very far the cheapest 4-wheel vehicles you can find in Vietnam, but even the most meticulously maintained ones are pushing 40 years and the pristine one-elederly-owner ones we sometimes see are not for sale anyway. So when we went looking for our Marou La Dalat, we chased one elusive seller after another all the way to the highland city of Dalat, and when we got there, we hopped from garage to chop shop to junkyard until we got to Bao Loc, 100km south of Dalat and finally clinched a deal with a seller who in retrospect seemed a bit too happy to have sold his car

As we left Bao Loc and made our way down from the highlands to the Dong Nai valley, the 40 year old Citroen, seemed happy to be coming out from a long sleep and going downhill in the cool air, went like a dream into the sunset. But we knew it might not last…