“What is your final destination…?” asked the South African immigration officer. “I’m travelling around the world,” answered the freshly forged physician in Orion’s Cartwheel, the first of a series of books he wrote years later to document his travels; “and I just want to see your beautiful country.” That desire to “see” and experience different places and people shaped Dr. Lawrence Winkler into a lifelong wayfarer. It is still the rocket fuel propelling him today. His preferred mode of movement? Hitchhiking.
A man seemingly captivated by a never-ending inventory of interests—from history to philosophy, through science, nature, literature, music, art, and the human mind—Winkler self-identifies as a “physician, traveler, and natural philosopher” whose “molecules have morphed from medicine to manuscript.” He is a writer rivetted by writer-explorers, and the author of medical detective novels, historical novels, and a feast of titles spanning science fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, travelogues, and short fiction. His work includes Bandits of Madagascar, Stout Men, Wagon Days, the Doctor Sababa books, The Bolthole, Poetry of the Senses, etc. He started out with a double major in aerospace engineering and biology from M.I.T., after which he consulted for NASA, significantly on a human space colony habitat prototype. He attended medical school to become an Internal Medicine specialist, and for some three decades thereafter has taught and practiced medicine.
Lawrence Winkler spent several months exploring Africa, crossing borders on foot, going from country to country, meeting people. That piqued our interest. He writes in witty and engaging prose of that experience in excerpts published on this website. HIS WEBSITE.
This interview with Sola Osofisan has been edited for length and clarity.
=====
SOLA OSOFISAN: In Orion’s Cartwheel, the first in a series of travelogues written by you, Mama Szlapak asked you, “Are you running from, or looking for?” regarding your hitchhiking journey around the world that had brought you to her doorstep in Nairobi. “Neither,” you responded. “I’m only dancing while I can.” Are you still dancing?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Still Dancing. ‘Lost my beautiful wife to cancer in April of this (2025) year. We discovered the meaning of life in a midnight rhumba on a Cuban beach thirty years ago.
Currently on a six-month circumnavigation of the planet. Through Iceland, Madeira, Cabo Verde, Albania, Oman, Yemen, Bhutan, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia, I’ve just arrived in Papua New Guinea for two weeks before heading onward to New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines. Hope to make it home by March 1, 2026.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Sorry to hear about the loss of your wife. I’m keen to know when you first knew you wanted to hitchhike – and not cross-country, but across continents; “around the world.” What drives a man to hitch rides from strangers when he can afford to drive or fly to any destination?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Sometime during my medical internship in 1980, I realized that if I was going to ever taste real freedom, it needed to be before my future medical career swallowed me whole. I wanted to get as close as possible to the terroir of every country I visited and decided that hitchhiking and blind luck were the purest allies of real adventure.
SOLA OSOFISAN: “Blind luck”? What role does luck play on the road?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: It depends how much entropy and chaos you allow into your experience. Sometimes the result is ephemeral; sometimes tragic. The important part is how you interpret how it has changed you.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You were about 26, a second-year resident physician in demand, with parents and friends, and what did you say to them? I have to do this while I’m still young and daring? This was in 1980? How did that conversation go?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Basically, like that. The reactions were different, depending on the inquisitor. My medical program director understood immediately and told me to call him from Bangkok in five years’ time. My grandmother signed a one-dollar bill and told me to bring it back to her (it didn’t make it). My father told me not to expect him to bail me out of some Bolivian jail and not to come back with herpes.
SOLA OSOFISAN: #2 on your Rules of Hitchhiking list is “Possessions weigh you down.” Was there anything like a “standard hitchhiker’s gear” back then, or did the contents of your luggage change depending on the destination? What did you typically pack?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: My travel kit changed continuously. The main lesson arrived in Belize when I was beaten and robbed at knifepoint and liberated from my 60-pound backpack and too much stuff weighing me down (including a silver flute donated by a girlfriend in Vancouver.) I travelled very light after that. Less is more—toothbrush, camera, t-shirt, shorts, sandals, cap, passport, and money belt.
SOLA OSOFISAN: I’m interested in the Africa leg of your journey. You departed Canada, hitchhiked through the US and Mexico, into and through South America, and hopped from Brazil across the South Atlantic into South Africa. Were you following a map, or plan, or just winging it?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Africa is vast so I aimed for Capetown to Cairo as a clear shot up the continent.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You’ve written about escaping lions and hyenas and gunmen on your travels. Anyone could have predicted some of those. Do you not perceive risk the way others do, or you just work carefully around it?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: I let every day wash over me because, in my young naivete, I thought that every type of experience had the same educational value. It took a long time before acquired judgement began to narrow the aperture.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Did you really flash your butt in public at a white Immigration Officer in South Africa to prove you’re white, or that was the writer in you adding colour to your story?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Yep. Still very memorable.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You went on to work for several months in a hospital in South Africa. You even had an encounter with Nelson Mandela. This was during the apartheid era. What was that experience like for you?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Magical. Despite the collective inequality inherent in the system, everyone seemed to treat everyone else based on their personal character. It was a simpler time in a beautiful country and I never sensed the sort of hatred that you find in the country today.
SOLA OSOFISAN: In what other way has your medical background been useful to you on the road?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: I had opportunity to practice as an emergency physician in South Africa, a pathologist and anesthetist in Denmark and a locum family physician in Australia and New Zealand. There wasn’t much money in it; just enough to allow me to keep travelling. I just rocked up and found work, something now impossible to do.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You started out in South Africa, into Eastern Africa, and on to Northern Africa, from where you crossed via Egypt into Israel. Have you gone back since that time? In what ways do you think the bits of Africa you saw over several months back then differ from what exists today?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: I’ve been back to South Africa and Zimbabwe and Zambia and also travelled in Rwanda, Uganda, Namibia, Botswana, and Madagascar. The bits I travelled on my odyssey have changed dramatically—corruption and cynicism have replaced innocence; plastic has replaced handicraft.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You spent quite a bit of time on your own on the road, in silence. As a budding writer back then with a philosopher muse, what thoughts crossed your mind in those moments?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Every impression, every thought was new and unencumbered, and seasoned with the spice of local culture.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Conversely, hopping in people’s cars and homes often involves a lot of talking to make nice. Were the conversations all temporal, or did any become a still existing association? Or impermanence is the fate of friendships for a hitchhiker?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: I’m still friends with some, but most were an ethereal tangent. Some were nothing more than the usual exchange of biographies, but others were deep and profound and there was no way of telling which driver in which vehicle would turn out how.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Hitchhiking inevitably prolongs a journey. Is taking your time baked into the plan? And to extend the question beyond the road, is taking your time something you do, perhaps akin to a way of life for you?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: There was no greater contrast than the variable time that came in hitchhiking and the pressure cooker frenzy of medical residency. But while some rides were slow in coming and going, others were bullets. A hitch from Carcassonne to Barcelona in an eighteen-wheeler returning from Iraq, another from a trucking company owner from Bahia Blanca to Buenos Aires, a third from Checkpoint Charlie to the Amalfi coast, there are many examples of me arriving before any other form of transport. My later life has averaged out into a slow burn.
SOLA OSOFISAN: I don’t think it says anywhere in your detailed travelogues that you took notes on the road. Did you? Or do you just happen to have an incredible sense of recall?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: I did keep a diary which helped me remember some of the details and flavours of an experience, but my memory of everything I did in five years of hitchhiking far exceeds the power to recall what I had for dinner last evening.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You turned 28 at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Do you still have the “Uhuru Diploma” you were awarded for reaching the peak? Have you done anything since that’s topped that conquest?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: ‘Still have the Uhuru Diploma. Nothing to top that, but since Kilimanjaro, I have climbed Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka, the Thorong La pass in Nepal, Mount Bromo in Indonesia, Huascaran in Peru, and the Tiger’s Nest Monastery in Bhutan.
SOLA OSOFISAN: On Kilimanjaro, you couldn’t resist the urge to look for Hemingway’s leopard as described in his short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. He’s one of your favourites. Did Hemingway ever attempt the mountain, do you know? Or did he leave that bit of exploring to his characters and daredevil readers?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Hemingway never summitted Kilimanjaro but he was severely injured in two plane crashes in Africa, one of them meant to be a medical evacuation from the first one.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Hemingway, Conrad, Melville, Cervantes, Kafka, Twain, Kipling… You say these writers and others have influenced your vision and style. It appears personal quests, displacement, direct but vivid prose, are some qualities they have in common. What is it about their writing that connects with you?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Irreverence, rugged individualism, male journeys, and pragmatic realism. Making oneself the hero of your own myth.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You’ve studied, taught and practiced the sciences for decades. How does the scientist in you cohabit with the storyteller in you?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Such a great question. I write on three levels. The first is a lyrical floor, where the reader doesn’t need rigorous scientific precision to appreciate the narrative. The second is the science that makes the story even more fascinating. And the third is the existential view, a synthesis of all the possible human ways of appreciating the story. the scientist doesn’t cohabit; he synergizes.
SOLA OSOFISAN: I’m fascinated by your use of language; often fluid, dramatic, visual and humorous prose. For instance, “The road went from dust to soup, without passing through mud. The air was so liquid I couldn’t catch a breath…” How did you cultivate that? How did you learn to write that way?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: I have no idea. But it’s there when I need it.
SOLA OSOFISAN: No, you must have some sort of idea. I believe it takes years of reading, writing practice and learning from feedback to make it so effortless and “there” when needed. You have to “think” those words before they take shape on the page. How did you discover storytelling?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: We’re all storytellers in our own way. I’ve had the privilege of surrendering my situational control to the gestalt of many years of random encounters. That’s my only idea. I just let it happen.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Have you considered the irony in the fact that for many of the people you met in rural Africa, walking everywhere was and still is a way of life? While you were hitchhiking and walking for self-discovery, for them, it was probably the only way to get where they needed to be.
LAWRENCE WINKLER: It causes a deep heartache within. There’s nothing so cruel than to have to expend energy to stand still because you have no other choice. Everyone I met on African roads would remind me of how fortunate I was to be a simple observer.
SOLA OSOFISAN: How do you remain culturally sensitive and write about the places you visit as an outsider without causing offence?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: It’s increasingly difficult. We live in an age of identity politics and accusations of cultural appropriation. But I never travelled through anywhere or with anyone with whom I didn’t treat as an equal spirit who I could learn from. No one gets offended. Seems to still work.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Are there aspects of your travels in Africa and elsewhere you’ve never shared with the world in your travelogues? You know those “what happens on the road stays on the road” type stories? You can tell me. I won’t tell…
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Absolutely. But no one will ever know.
SOLA OSOFISAN: The Lawrence Winkler that set out on the road in the summer of 1980, and the one that returned home five years later… In what ways did the travels change him? How have your travels impacted your worldview and influenced the man you are today?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Ouch. One of my original goals in setting out and traveling the way I did as long as I did was to return home with the sort of wisdom I imagined the road would automatically confer on my kind of nomad—tolerance, gregariousness, rationality, serenity, repletion. Some of this seeped in, but I didn’t count on what the balance sheet would change in return—impatience with lesser consciousness, aching and ageing from the bone-shattering physics of perpetual motion, a yearning for solitary silence and many other less-than-noble influences. Still, I’m so much more fulfilled for having done it.
SOLA OSOFISAN: This pilgrimage, self-search, exploration… Have you found what you were looking for? Or the search is ongoing? If you haven’t found it, maybe it doesn’t exist?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: It exists and I believe I’ve found it. The irony is that I can’t share it. My search is now for confirmation.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Are you a hit at social gatherings, with your colourful and dramatic stories? Do friends ask you to give spontaneous Ted Talks on your adventures? Or they still think you’re the odd fish?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Sometimes a hit, but only in well-selected venues. Family and friends mostly don’t want to know because they’re terrified of finding out that they’re missing something. Definitely the odd fish.
SOLA OSOFISAN: In your travelogues, you went “traveling in the past, before cell phones, laptops, and hybrid cars…”(to quote you). Hitchhiking should be easier now with so much of modern technology to aid the modern adventurer, right? Are the roads friendlier? Are people more welcoming? What do you think?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: People are the same but they think and move faster. I was so fortunate to travel in the era before instant connectivity. There was unpredictable adventure before breakfast every morning.
SOLA OSOFISAN: I keep coming across solitude, philosophy, gardening, the simple life, and nature in references to you… All seemingly laid back and safe, yet, you climbed Kilimanjaro, so you’re probably the kind of person who would also jump on a space flight, go skydiving, climb Everest, try wing walking… How far from the truth am I? Or are those thrill-seeker activities already conquests in your other books?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: Bang on. A complete being needs the yin and yang of both.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Uncle Wink in Orion’s Cartwheels tells us “A very long story through many lands.” I could go on, but this is already a long interview, so let me wrap with Mama Szlapak again and say “You’ve got guts.” Is that what it takes to do the things you have done and live the fulfilled life?
LAWRENCE WINKLER: It helps.
=====
The first 13 rules of hitchhiking (according to Lawrence Winkler in Orion’s Cartwheel):
(1) It’s not up to you.
(2) Possessions weigh you down.
(3) Wait a bit longer.
(4) You have other options.
(5) Never ride on top of the truck. And never sleep under it.
(6) Don’t make promises.
(7) Listen to local advice.
(8) You always get a ride. Except when you don’t.
(9) Sometimes you take the bus.
(10) Never run out of water.
(11) The road provides.
(12) All good deeds don’t lead to heaven.
(13) Obey the local road signs.