Am I in France?

Bonjour, tout le monde! Bienvenue à la belle France. Obviously I'm not actually in France but I might as well be considering the ridiculous number of Frenchies here. On our first day in Cat Ba, I thought that the Germans were the overwhelming majority but turns out their old frenemies the French have le upper main (the upper hand, for those not as gifted in French as my good self). They are everywhere, shrugging and looking surly as only the French know how. Fin and I are becoming quite the experts in guessing nationalities and we have got the French well and truly down now.
We had a really great day yesterday, although it was another early start, which Fin loved with all his heart. At about half 8 we went out on an old wooden boat into the bay for a day of water-based fun-sadly it was quite cloudy and a bit nippy on deck, but we hardened sailors toughed it out for a couple of hours. We sailed through some amazing scenery-huge rocky cliffs and a totally incomprehensible maze of little islands and fishing villages. It was truly amazing. I now have about 5000 photos of some big grey rocks, which you can all look forward to seeing when I work out how to upload photos on here. The accompanying dialogue will be something like this "here is a big rock. This another big rock we saw and THIS is a particularly rocky rock of the rock variety". Yes, you should be very excited.
After a couple of hours we went off kayaking into some so-called secluded caves, which were less secluded and more like a meeting place for Foreign Visitors to Cat Ba. Despite the kayak party in the lakes, it was actually beautiful-we even saw some wild monkeys, just chilling out on some rocks, having a little grooming session. Fin, being the 20 year old lad that he is, challenged some of our fellow tour mates to a kayak race. As I was in a kayak with Fin, I was more than thrilled at the prospect, especially since we had no life jackets. Great!
Back on the boat, it was, mercifully, time to eat what I can only describe as a culinary miracle. It was a full on Vietnamese spread of fresh fish, spring rolls, squid and shrimp patties for 12 people, all cooked in a tiny kitchen at the back of the boat. I'm pretty sure I ate about 80% of the spring rolls, but I distracted people from this by talking to a German about Everyone's favourite holiday topic-tax! Oh, it was a great conversation-so joyful and full of light and hilarious anecdotes about the delights of the German tax system. You can imagine the laughs we must have had.
The rest of the day trip included some swimming and snorkelling, which lasted all of 15 minutes because it was actually rather murky in the water and pretty chilly, and more chugging around on the boat. We did a few laps of one part of the bay because somehow we lost a kayak and we had to go look for it. Our guide even had a safari explorer hat on for the occasion. Unfortunately it didn't help his kayak-seeking senses and he gave it up as a lost cause. We eventually got back about half 5 and went for a well deserved lie down before going out for some lovely beer with some of the people off the boat.
All in all, a rather tip top day!