Farmers plant rice seedlings in a paddy in Karanganyar, near Solo, Central Java, Indonesia in this April 13, 2016 photo taken by Antara Foto. (Photo by Maulana Surya/Reuters/Antara Foto)

A man cries over the body of his girlfriend, who was killed by shelling in the Kalininsky district of Donetsk, territory under control of the pro-Russian Government of the Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine, Thursday, June 9, 2022, during the Russian invasion. (Photo by Alexei Alexandrov/AP Photo)

A lion statue that sits outside the New York Public Library building wears a mask in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., September 28, 2020. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

A dachshund portraying a racehorse, trots down Duval Street in Key West, Florida, December 31, 2014. About 175 dachshunds and other dogs participated in the event that preludes four warm-weather takeoffs on New York City's Times Square ball drop. (Photo by Steve Panariello/Reuters/Florida Keys News Bureau)

A horse handler poses with a horse during a beach parade at Muizenberg beach, in Cape Town, South Africa on January 5, 2024. (Photo by Esa Alexander/Reuters)

People wear face masks to protect against the coronavirus as they walk across an intersection in Beijing, Friday, June 5, 2020. China on Friday reported five new confirmed coronavirus cases, all of them brought by Chinese citizens from outside the country. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo)

A woman spends her time outdoors to observe the ancient festival of Sizdeh Bedar, an annual public picnic day on the 13th day of the Iranian new year, at the Tochal mountainous area northern Tehran, Iran, Sunday, April, 2, 2017. Sizdeh Bedar, which comes from the Farsi words for “thirteen” and “day out”, is a legacy from Iran's pre-Islamic past that hard-liners in the Islamic Republic never managed to erase from calendars. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

Merit: A Night at Deadvlei. The night before returning to Windhoek, we spent several hours at Deadveli. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the sand dunes in the distance, but the skies were still dark enough to clearly see the milky way and magellanic clouds. Deadveli means “dead marsh. The camelthorn trees are believed to be about 900 years old, but have not decomposed because the environment is so dry. (Photo and caption by Beth McCarley/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)