You own a banana plantation. Congratulations. You’ve got 3,000 bananas and a market that’s exactly 1,000 miles away. You also have a camel that can carry a maximum of 1,000 bananas at any time. Sounds manageable so far, right?
Here’s the catch: your camel eats one banana for every mile it walks. Every. Single. Mile. There and back. And there are no other ways to transport the bananas — it’s just you, the camel, and a very long road.
So the question is: what’s the maximum number of bananas you can deliver to that market 1,000 miles away?
Your first thought might be pretty grim. If the camel can carry 1,000 bananas and the market is 1,000 miles away, it’s going to eat all 1,000 bananas just getting there. That means zero bananas delivered. So you’d have to make three trips of nothing? That can’t be right.
And you’d be correct — it’s not that simple. Because here’s the thing nobody tells you right away: nobody said the camel has to walk all 1,000 miles in one go. What if the camel makes shorter trips? What if you create supply depots along the way?
This is where the puzzle transforms from seemingly impossible to genuinely fascinating.
Let’s think about the first part of the journey. You have 3,000 bananas. The camel can only carry 1,000 at a time. So to move all 3,000 bananas even one mile forward, the camel needs to make five trips for that mile — carry 1,000 forward, walk back empty, carry another 1,000 forward, walk back empty, carry the last 1,000 forward. That’s five miles walked for one mile of progress, costing five bananas per mile.
Wait, actually, let’s recount. The camel takes the first load one mile forward, walks back — that’s two miles, two bananas. Takes the second load one mile forward, walks back — four miles, four bananas total. Takes the third load one mile forward — five miles, five bananas total. The camel doesn’t need to walk back after the last load. So moving all 3,000 bananas one mile costs five bananas.
Now here’s the clever bit. You don’t want to be making five trips per mile for the entire journey. The fewer bananas you have, the fewer trips you need. Once you’re down to 2,000 bananas, you only need three trips per mile — forward, back, forward, back, forward. That costs three bananas per mile. And once you’re down to 1,000, it’s just one trip — one banana per mile.
So the strategy is to divide the journey into phases. Phase one: move all 3,000 bananas until you’ve eaten enough that you only have 2,000 left. Phase two: move the remaining 2,000 until you’re down to 1,000. Phase three: load up one final time and make a straight shot to the market.
Here’s where the math gets satisfying. In phase one, you’re burning five bananas per mile. You need to burn through 1,000 bananas to get from 3,000 down to 2,000. At five bananas per mile, that takes you 200 miles. So after 200 miles, you’ve got 2,000 bananas at the 200-mile mark.
Phase two: now you’re burning three bananas per mile. You need to burn 1,000 bananas to go from 2,000 down to 1,000. At three bananas per mile, that’s 333 and a third miles. So at the 533-mile mark, you’ve got 1,000 bananas.
Phase three: you have 1,000 bananas and 467 miles left. One banana per mile. That costs 467 bananas.
If you’re still wrestling with the numbers, still trying to figure out the transitions — take five or ten more minutes. Let your brain grind through it. That frustration, that friction of almost getting it but not quite — that’s like going to the gym but for your brain’s connections. Lean into it.
Ready?
The answer is 533 bananas. You can deliver 533 and one-third bananas to the market. Obviously you can’t deliver a third of a banana in practice, so it’s 533. Out of 3,000 bananas, you save just over a sixth. Your camel ate the rest. That’s one well-fed camel.
The real beauty of this puzzle is the counterintuitive strategy. Making multiple shorter trips and creating staging points along the way actually saves bananas compared to any single long haul. The optimization is all about minimizing the overhead of return trips.
So here’s my question for you: can you think of a situation in your life where making multiple small moves — even if they seem redundant — actually gets you further than one big push? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
