Colourful Pakistani Beetle Takes Frenchman on Road Trip to Paris

A French doctor, Vincent Loos, is taking “Foxy Shahzadi” — a 25-year-old Volkswagen Beetle, ‘Foxy’ as they’re known in Pakistan — for a road trip from Islamabad to Paris to promote a “softer side of Pakistan”. The doctor has just finished three years’ work at a local hospital. Doctors without borders indeed – or perhaps doctors without sense. The “Foxy” should reach Paris in about two weeks. Only six months ago Vincent Loos’s ride was a dust-smeared wreck, collapsed at the bottom of an Islamabad street waiting for a final trip to the scrapyard. Loos, an intensive care specialist, restored the car to full health, then hired an artist to paint in the local style known as “truck art”. Vincent Loos is travelling by Foxy, and is paying homage to a local motoring cult. Dozens of well-maintained Beetles ply the streets. (the writer’s, in a cool grey, is Betsy, a proud 1967 model.) The body is covered in a psychedelic array of flowers, waterfalls and the faces of famous Pakistanis. The idea behind the 6,000-mile trip is to promote the “soft side” of Pakistan. “We want to show the world it’s not just about terrorism,” says Loos. Now the “Foxy Shahzadi”, or Beetle Princess, is the most distinctive car from Lahore to Lyons. His team is equipped with an ample stock of spare parts and a line of Urdu poetry inscribed on the bonnet: “Every mother’s prayer is a breeze from paradise.”