A man carries his dog as he prays during Vesak Day, an annual celebration of Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death, at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon temple in Ayutthaya, Thailand, May 10, 2017. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

Female Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters watch on as they release a bear into the wild in the Gara Mountains near the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk on March 4, 2018, after Iraqi Kurdish Animal rights activists from a local NGO rescued it from a private home. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP Photo)

Black-headed gulls sit on pickets at a riverside in Tokyo, Japan, December 27, 2015. (Photo by Toru Hanai/Reuters)

A moon light illuminates the sky through the clouds over a large line of grass between some home houses in the small village of Tafalla, northern Spain, Tuesday, May 1, 2018. (Photo by Alvaro Barrientos/AP Photo)

Natalia Williams dressed as Corpse Bride Emily and Tony Knight as a Mandalorian, arrive at the Bradford Unleashed Comic-Con, an entertainment and comic book convention in England on March 8, 2020. (Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images)

Cheng Chen (R), a 27-year-old worker at a state-owned enterprise, poses for a photograph with his nephew who is wearing his home-made Iron Man armour, in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province April 13, 2015. It cost Cheng about 500 yuan ($81 USD) to make the armour, which weighs about 4 kilograms, with plastic boards and LED lights, local media reported. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

A photo made available on 14 March 2016 shows a Thai villager takes selfie photograph on drought parched land at the dried up Mae Chang reservoir in Lampang province, northern Thailand, 12 March 2016. The ruined village including ancient temple had been underwater for 34 years since the Mae Chang reservoir was built in 1982, the area has now re-emerged after water in the reservoir dried up caused by the severe drought. Thailand is facing the worst drought in decades hardest hit by El Nino phenomenon combined with seasonal hot weather. (Photo by Rungroj Yongrit/EPA)

Nine years ago, Tom Carter traveled from San Francisco to China, responding to a job posting that turned out to be a scam. He managed to find another job as a teacher, and saved enough money to embark on a 56,000 km trip through all of China's 33 provinces that lasted two years. Carrying a camera – just a a 4-megapixel point-and-shoot – Carter captured some amazing images of the widely varying landscape, people, and architecture across the nation. Photo: Buddhist pilgrim family from Sichuan. (Photo by Tom Carter via The Atlantic)