Chloe Lowe jumped out of a plane at 10,000ft to celebrate turning 24.
Six weeks later she’s still in Australia, medically barred from flying and booking her accommodation one week at a time.
The influencer from Rotherham flew out in October for three weeks of solo travel.
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With three days left, she went skydiving.
“I’m trapped on the other side of the world with no way home,” Chloe said, as reported by Creatorzine.
“I’ve been stranded in Australia for several weeks.”
All smiles at 10,000ft, then silence
The jump went fine.
The trouble started once the adrenaline wore off and Chloe realised she couldn’t hear.
“I was told it needed immediate medical attention as I lost all hearing and turns out there was bleeding behind my ear drum,” she said.
Doctors put her on steroids and signed her off as unfit to fly.
For a fortnight, things looked good.
Then the pain came back, and the vertigo got worse.
“Turns out I now have an infection due to fluid that’s been trapped inside my ear,” Chloe said.
Stuck week to week, 10,000 miles from Rotherham
Nobody can tell her how long healing will take.
It could be weeks.
She has already stayed three weeks longer than planned, and the not knowing is, in her words, driving her mad.
“Every week I’m having to extend my accommodation not knowing if I’ll be able to go home by the end of it or not,” she said.
Extra holiday, technically.
The real reason she went
Chloe told her followers the trip was a birthday treat.
It was more than that.
In 2016, her grandad David Lowe died while scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
This year marks a decade since his death, and Chloe travelled to the reef to do the same dive.
“This was a really meaningful trip for me, as I wanted to visit the place where he took his last breath,” she said.
Her audience still doesn’t know. “No one knows I was here to do the dive or visit for his 10 year anniversary yet as I haven’t announced it on my social media.”
Why It Matters
The skydive clip is close to a rite of passage for travel creators, and most never think about what happens if their body says no on landing.
A fit-to-fly certificate doesn’t care about posting schedules, rent back home or return flights.
Chloe’s trip is also a reminder that the version audiences see is often the edited one.
Her followers got a birthday adventure. The trip itself was about grief.
Solo female travel is one of the busiest niches on TikTok and Instagram, where things going wrong tend to travel further than things going right.
For now, Chloe waits on an infection to clear and a doctor to sign her off.
Whether she tells her followers why she was really on the reef, she hasn’t said.
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