National Geographic, which recently won 10 National Geographic Traveler Awards, has unveiled its top destinations for 2022. They include Puerto Rico, Galapagos Islands, Hong Kong, Western Australia, New Zealand, New Zealand, and a tropical safari for dine-and-drive enthusiasts in South Africa.
The three emerging destinations include Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Costa Rica.
As it did in the inaugural issue in 2018, National Geographic partnered with Alix & Alix on a never-before-released image and story project called Encounter. The New York Times published four images curated and composed by Alix Landreeffer, a well-known landscape photographer. The most striking, a series of pictures of animals like a cheetah and a leopard amid greenery in South Africa, was one of a trio from several photographers that Landreeffer showcased in her S. H. Stein team: Blake K. Marchisello, Susan Bucka, and Michael Halfacre.
“What I liked most about the project,” Landreeffer says, “was the ability to visually just find a new way to capture images and storytelling on a different level.”
Also on view in “A Moment of Paradise” is several instances of human ingenuity, including the quest to preserve one of the most poignant genetic markers in mammalian evolution: a gene mutation that causes birth defects and a much older, but more human-like mark that may indicate the evolutionary age of the same species.
The images and story appear in print and on NatGeo, NGCD’s digital and mobile platforms.