chiang mai

I'm in the process of buying a condo and I wonder if anyone has a decent purchase contract I can copy and ammend? I've previously written my own contracts for these things and I do have older ones that I can adapt. This time however I'm buying a unit that's in a company name rather than from a private individual and I want to see if there's any unusual risk from a contract perspective.

And before anyone mentions it, no, I'm not inclined to go see a lawyer here for this purpose because it's mostly unecessary. Also, please, no debates about whether it's sensible to buy vs rent and all that stuff about not bringing more money into Thailand than you can afford to loose. I've been here for nine years and have bought and sold units in the same building previously.

Thanks in advance.

Mrs CM and I are going to Bali in three weeks time and we've never been there before so we're looking for tips on what to see/do/avoid whilst we're there - I know of the reputation of Kuta but that's about all. We can be beach people but only for about one day, the rest of it needs to be about exploring and seeing places/things we've never seen before.

Our accomodation is taken care of and we're staying at Legian for three nights, possibly four, most likely we'll fly with Air Asia from Chiang Mai. Presumably there's a visa on arrival for UK and Thai passport holders but nice if someone can confirm.

So, any ideas or inputs to this quick jaunt, the hotel part of the trip is a freebie courtesy of where Mrs CM works at the Chedi so we've got some fairly upmarket accomodation in store, question is, what about the rest of it? Over to you and thanks in advance.

The question is, what should we do when we come across a doctor that is clearly not up to scratch, one that gives us medical advice that is blatantly wrong and puts our health at risk and charges us a fairly large sum of money in the process.

Increasingly I'm hearing stories from friends and people I know ho have spent a lot of time and money on hospital consultations, only to find out later that the advice they were given was not only wrong but sometimes even dangerous. And I'm not talking about small town doctors and back street clinics here, more often than not I'm referring to major private hospitals where the consultation fees are in excess of THB 1,000 baht and the prescribed medicine costs are inflated by several hundred per cent.

My inclination is to complain to the hospital and to let it be known that I'm not happy, I like to think that at some point that action will have a positive effect. Others I know will simply walk away and get their medical problems resolved elsewhere because they are unwilling to complain or put poor performance down to TIT. I've initiated internal complaints against what one of the largest private hospital in Bangkok and probably the best known, they have an internal complaints procedure which kicks in as soon as a patient expresses their displeasure. But mostly it's all window dressing, a process that has a predetermined end where supposedly independent and senior staff investigate who did/said what, in recreating those steps doctors lie and claim to have done all manner of things they didn't thus the system there doesn't really work. But I like to think that if the hospital has to repeat that same process enough times, with the same doctor, there will be a benefit at some point.

I understand that it's difficult for a doctor to be right 100% of the time but I also think it's not difficult for a doctor to refer a patient if they simply don't know what the answer is, this nasty business of “saving face” is involved here somewhere, the question is, what would you do, complain or walk?

CAT just told me that my CDMA internet services is going to be closed down soon hence I'm now looking at switching to 3G, I want to stay with CAT because having their monthly billing is useful for a number of reasons that I wont go in to here.

But the spec I was given by CAT for the aircard I need in order to get their service looks like this:

850mhz, HSPA/3G/UTMS, 7.2 Mbps

There's loads of aircards out there but I can't find one that is rated for UTMS or full blown HSPA, HSPDA (down) or HSPUA (up) yes but not HSPA. Also, UTMS capability is nowhere to be seen, am I missing something here?

thanks