Information about travel to India’s Hardiwar religious event will be available at the Luxury Travel Expo in Las Vegas. It will be the largest religious gathering in the world in the new millenium, with approximately 60 million pilgrims expected to attend. The India Tourism booth number 134 at the Expo will have information about the event.
The event, called Kumbha Mela will be held in Hardiwar from January to April of 2010. "Tourists from around the world will travel to Hardiwar to experience the life-changing Kumbha Mela, where bathing in the sacred Ganges is said to wash away sins," said Sanjiv Vashist, assistant director of India Tourism Los Angeles. "In addition to people who travel for the religious experience, many travel to the site to photograph the spectacle of it all. For instance in the evening, thousands of people light lamps and float them down the river, which makes for an unforgettable image."
The evning will be filled with the chanting of hymns, fragrance of burning incenses, worship of Ganges in the evening, chiming bells, processions of elephants, horses, chariots and more.
Hardiwar is located in north India where the Ganges enters the plains from the Himalayas. It is just over 140 miles from Delhi in the state of Uttarakhand. Direct rail connections to Hardiwar are available from Delhi and other major Indian cities.