Allahabad, the westernmost of the three, on February 2nd for one of the most auspicious dipping days of the Kumbh Mela, a massive 1.5 month-long Hindu gathering that occurs only every 6 years or so. We left Kolkata on an overnight train to Bodhgaya, arriving at 5AM. We slept a bit more and ventured out into this small town, which is Buddhism's holiest site. It is in the poverty-stricken state of Bihar, and at least some of the streets reflected the struggles of the poor there. 
We walked up a short hill, turned right, then looked right onto the magnificent Mahabodhi Temple, the epicenter of Buddhism and a World Heritage site. On the grounds of this temple, in the 6th century BCE, when there was nothing but trees and birds here, Gautama Buddha went into deep meditation and attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. He went on to meditate for one week at a time at several different spots in this same small area before venturing out to spread his message of the "Middle Path" to freedom of suffering. This is a quick summary of a great story. Anyway, the temple itself was started in the 3rd century BCE and completed much later. It is an elegant and imposing structure surrounded by beautiful gardens and in the back is a descendant of the very tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment. We walked around this place for several hours in total, as it really is impressive. It was a joy to just watch so many pilgrims from East/SE Asia (and some from India and the West) in prayer and in awe of this place, some even prostrating themselves over and over until they covered every part of the complex.
The Bodhi tree was simple but magical in that setting, with people either praying or meditating peacefully on either side of the fence that guarded the trunk. Of course it wasn't peaceful when a leaf would fall from the tree, in which case people would leap after it like it was gold. The meditation was impressive. Some people meditated for several hours in the same exact position - I have a book that teaches one how to do this but I doubt I can purge enough of the chaos embedded in my brain to succeed at such a thing. I actually tried to meditate at the Temple for a half-hour and I think I had 30 seconds of relative lucency and questionable clarity, which isn't bad considering that is was dusk and the mosquitoes were out in full force - this guy next to me was absolutely still as a rock and undeterred while 5 mosquitoes were feasting on his left hand alone! We saw a giant Buddha statue and temples from countries all over Asia before sleeping to wake up the next day at 3:30 AM to catch our train for Varanasi.
So we went from the capital of Buddhism to the capital of Hinduism in a matter of hours. Varanasi, unlike Bodhgaya, is a sizeable city so it has all the energy and madness of any other Indian city, and you can't tell it's a holy place until you get to the Ganges river, which we didn't do until about 4PM ---- I must make a detour here and describe what these days were like. We would wake up ridiculously early, race out of the hotel to catch a taxi to barely make it to the train station in time, chug along for a few hours with minimal sleep, arrive, choose among the marauding rickshaw guys, find a hotel (we usually didn't have a reservation anywhere), check-in, maybe shower, then race out to see everything we wanted to see with the remaining 6 hours of daylight. As some of you know, I can be demanding when I have my mind set on something, so I laid down the edict early on that we could not take a break for lunch with such a tight schedule - at best, we could have some street food. Madhavi made us brake this rule in Bodhgaya and she could tell I was not happy with the "wasted" hour of lunch, so she resigned herself to my military-like tour thereafter.
--- So in Varanasi we managed to take "too long" to shower and only had about 5 hours of daylight left. So we caught the first auto rickshaw we saw and hired him for the day. We hadn't eaten since we woke up 10 hours earlier - and I was STARVING but we had to stick with my master plan so I didn't complain. We grabbed some oranges and bananas and ate them like animals while the rickshaw raced around to temple after temple. One of the temples was dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey-god, and fittingly there were monkeys flying all over the place doing whatever they wanted at this place - Madh stepped in some monkey poo with her bare feet and I bought some shampoo (all we could find) for her to clean up with. Anyway, none of this distracted from our escalating hunger so we bought some peanuts to tide us over before we finally arrived at the holy Ganges river.
I must say, the "Ganga" in Varanasi is quite a sight as it gently arcs by an ancient city that rises lovingly beside it on its north side while offering only a sea of sand, a distant forest, and a few dedicated sadhus on its south side. We took a boat down the river, where we rowed by the famous ghats (embankments), where people prayed, took dips in the holy water, and where bodies were cremated in preparation for final resting in the river. We disembarked and entered dark narrow alleyways leading to the Golden Temple, re-built in 1780 and one of the holiest temples for Hindus, which was highly guarded and tucked away behind a densely packed marketplace, completely out of view before passing by armed guards. I only saw the gold-plated dome, while Madhavi and Vikram entered and were shuttled from one puja to another, at each being asked to donate 500 rupees each ("this is a 500 rupee puja for your parents", the priest would say); they did give and were quite disappointed.
We hopped back onto the boat and watched parts of the luminescent daily pujas that occur along the ghats. By the time we got back in the auto rickshaw, we realized that we were STARVING!!! For some reason we decided to drive a half-hour back to the hotel where we knew they had a decent restaurant. By the time we STARTED eating it was 9:30PM. Madhavi and Vikram somehow were not requiring much food, but I think I devoured more food than I have in years. I was stuffing my face continuously for an hour and a half. The next morning we again awoke well before sunrise and boarded a train for Allahabad. We arrived at a hotel by 9:30AM, but somehow we didn't leave the hotel until 1PM - Nima not happy! To top it off, we had to visit a travel agent for over an hour to hammer out our itinerary from there (you really need travel agents to book train tickets in India - that's all we use them for, we're still hard-core). So we only had like 4 hours of sunlight left this time - you can just imagine what that was like. We stopped first at Anand Bhavan, the home of the Nehru family and the meeting place of the Indian National Congress and various freedom-fighters - we all really enjoyed it. Places like this, of which there are so many in India, bring momentous history to life and are wonderful!
Finally, we reached the Yamuna river, where we again hopped on a boat and were taken down the waters towards the confluence of this river with the Ganges, a meeting point which extremely holy for Hindus.
This area is called the Sangam and is the focal point of the Kumbh Mela, where millions of Hindus converge to dip at the place where a drop of the nectar of immortality fell from Gods battling in the heavens ages ago. We watched the dipping pilgrims as the sun set behind us. The water is unfortunately heavily polluted, in fact septic, so we didn't enter at all (though a few drops splashed on my left foot). We walked through the Kumbh Mela campground and, to our surprise, fairgrounds too. This was far from just a serious gathering of ascetics, it is yet another Indian party.
There were food stands, carnival games, and even small roller-coasters! We got back to the hotel, AGAIN STARVING as we had eaten maybe a few crumbs all day. We swore we wouldn't impose such a fast again, but this wasn't the last time by a long shot. Overall, these three insanely intense days were very memorable and worth every minute. Little did we know that our next day would test us like nothing else had.
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