We rarely consider the broader global map when we have a specific destination in mind. Thirty years ago, I was heading to the island of Taiwan without casting the necessary panoramic gaze on the world around it. Yet a simple glance at the map would have revealed the immense mainland China nearby (180 km) and the Philippines not so far away (360 km). It is that my psychological steps were leading me southward, toward the Celebes and beyond to the other great islands of Kalimantan-Borneo and Sulawesi, the orchid island. Four thousand years ago, in a fundamental and decisive moment, the "Out of Taiwan" occurred—the immense and remarkable departure from Taiwan, when the Austronesians (re)took to the sea toward the Philippines and Southeast Asia. They could not have known that one day, in an enigmatic rush toward the western Indian Ocean, some of them would become the mysterious ancestors of us Malagasy. Every day, for at least 400 years, palynology, DNA, archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and of course history, continue to file past to investigate the case of the "most beautiful enigma in the world," the eternal question of Madagascar's settlement. How is it, for example, that I recognized "Neny," my grandmother, in the portrait gallery of the "Museum of Formosan Aborigenes" in Taipei? The word "aborigène," with a lowercase "a," should be taken here in its Latin sense of "those of origin." An anteriority demonstrated by an exceptional fact: nine of the ten branches of Austronesian languages are spoken by the aborigines of Taiwan. All the others who had departed, future Malagasy, Indonesians, or Maoris, found themselves attached to the single remaining branch. Travel educates the young. In an almost return of age, evoking an old journey in reverse, it is an old man who continues to learn. Nasolo-Valiavo Andriamihaja