Visiting Chile’s Atacama Desert With Kids
These are some of the other sites in Chile’s Atacama Desert we visited with our kids during our stay in San Pedro. They were quite a bit further away than the closer, easier sites like Valley of the Moon and Mars Valley and the roads were much, MUCH rougher. But we still managed to see them just fine with Baby and Toddler in tow.
Lagunas Escondidas Atacama
This was a ROUGH 1 hour drive from San Pedro. It felt longer than our 4 hour detour to see the Hand of the Desert. And I swear there were more tires along the way than the amount of whining we got from our Toddler.
I’ve been to the Dead Sea in Israel, but these lagunas were just so much more colorful! The floating effect you get from the salt is the same, however. There are 7 lagunas and you’re allowed to swim in some of them, so make sure to bring your bathing suit!
Laguna Chaxa
This is the classic flamingo spot. One might think the flamingos are just placed there for photo ops by the rangers – I mean what could you possibly find in these desert lakes?! But if you walk over to the volcanic rock on the side, you can actually see the tiny little shrimp that (somehow?) live here.
This was also the first time ever we picked up a hitch hiker. I mean – what better time to start than with two kids in the car, right? But this lady was truly in the middle of nowhere, in the literal middle of the desert, and we haven’t seen a single other car for hours. She joined us on the ride to Laguna Chaxa and magically put both of our kids to sleep with her presence alone ðŸ™
After exploring the sand and water, we had just one last stop to make on our desert adventure; Hand of the Desert.
