During the first six months of 2011, Rachel Katz, a 23-year old American girl, was on a Fulbright scholarship to study the trucking industry in China. She started at the most logical place, by hopping in a truck and taking a small journey. And then she did it again, with another truck, and then another until she had covered the better part of the third largest country in the world.

Katz knew that if she had first asked for permission she’d most likely have be turned down, by both her own government and the Chinese one, so instead she just did it.

“I got in a truck one day to go a short distance, and then I schemed and decided to go all out,” Katz told Business Insider. “In terms of ethnographic research this was a dream come true.”

Over the course of six months she covered almost 13 000km in the front seat of various long-haul trucks and gained invaluable insights to the industry.

Usually I got rides at gas stations. Service areas are pretty regular along the highway.

The men she traveled with were never aggressive or threatening in anyway, in fact she felt they took her on as their charge almost immediately after meeting her. Because of her unique situation, being stuck in the helm of a truck with drivers for hours at end, research was made easy as passengers soon became bored and were forced to converse. The scenery also helped,

The big front window is like a movie screen that repeatedly shows the same clip; road, road, another truck.

As one might expect, the differences she found between the Chinese trucking industry and the American one were vast to say the least, not least of which was how traffic control differed. As one trucker told her,

In the U.S., you issue tickets in order to control traffic. In China, we control traffic in order to issue tickets.

In the end her adventure proved to be an amazing experience which helped her land a job at McKinsey as a consultant. She also plans to write a book of her journey which will also feature many of her pictures from the road.

[Source: Business Insider]