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)

In the mountains of central Vietnam, a colossal pair of hands lifts a golden thread of walkway high above the clifftops, as if the mountain itself has sprouted limbs. Here: A giant hand structure at the Gold Bridge is seen on Ba Na hill near Danang city, Vietnam on August 1, 2018. (Photo by Reuters/Kham)

In the mangrove swamps of Quang Lang in Vietnam fishermen use stilts to take them into the deeper water on December 18, 2021. (Photo by Bang Nguyen Trong/Solent News)

Camera trapper Xavier Hubert-Brierre put this large mirror on the side of a road through the jungle in Gabon and left a camera there to record how the animals would respond to their own reflections. A silverback gorilla thought it was seeing another silverback and responded by trying to scare off the potential challenger… (Photo by Xavier Hubert-Brierre/Johns Hopkins University Press)

Buyan, a male Siberian brown bear, cools down under a stream of water sprayed by an employee in an enclosure on a hot summer day, at the Royev Ruchey zoo in Krasnoyarsk, Russia on June 14, 2019. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Squirrels are seen on a tree branch at a park as temperatures rise with the arrival of spring season in Ankara, Turkiye on March 27, 2024. (Photo by Evrim Aydin/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Local villagers fall onto the ground from an ox-cart as they ride to rid evil spirits from their village at Pring Ka-ek village, Cambodi. (Photo by Heng Sinith/AP Photo)