Russian cruise ship Astoria Grande has left the Black Sea port of Batumi after anti-war demonstrators threw eggs and called for its passengers to leave.

Georgia is courting Russian tourists, but protesters and opposition parties object to Russia’s occupation of Georgian territory and to its invasion of Ukraine.

A protest also took place against the cruises in the capital, Tbilisi.

The ship recently began Black Sea cruises from the Russian port of Sochi.

But Monday’s visit may be its last, as Batumi now appears to have been dropped from its schedule.

The Astoria Grande first weighed anchor last week, carrying some 800 Russian tourists to the Georgian resort.

The visit sparked anger from residents, as Russians were heard parroting Kremlin propaganda about the 2008 Russian invasion that left the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Russian hands.

The ship returned on Monday, hosting singers who have backed the war in Ukraine. As the tourists disembarked, protesters waved Georgian, Ukrainian and EU flags and chanted anti-Putin slogans.

During the day, police arrested 23 people, including a Ukrainian woman. The Astoria Grande left port on Tuesday evening, reportedly earlier than planned.

The ruling Georgian Dream party has angered many Georgians by seeking closer relations with Moscow and reinstating direct flights between the two countries.

Pro-European President Salome Zurabishvili has praised the protesters for challenging the “latest Russian provocation”, after Russia suspended a deal allowing Ukraine’s grain shipments and prevented free movement of shipping in the Black Sea.

Ruling party chairman Irakli Kobakhidze condemned the protests as violent and criticised US ambassador Kelly Degnan for saying nobody should expect Georgians to welcome tourists from a country that was occupying their territory.

Georgian reports said the ship had intended to enter Batumi every two weeks as part of a cruise costing some £900 (€1,150), but by Tuesday, Astoria Grande’s website had dropped the port in favour of a route along the Turkish coast.

On their tenth day at sea, the four Nigerian stowaways crossing the Atlantic in a tiny space above the rudder of a cargo ship, ran out of food and drink.

They survived another four days, according to their account, by drinking the sea water crashing just meters below them, before being rescued by Brazilian federal police in the southeastern port of Vitoria.

Their remarkable, death-defying journey across some 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of ocean underlines the risks some migrants are prepared to take for a shot at a better life.

“It was a terrible experience for me,” said 38-year-old Thankgod Opemipo Matthew Yeye, one of the four Nigerians, in an interview at a Sao Paulo church shelter. “On board it is not easy. I was shaking, so scared. But I’m here.”

Their relief at being rescued soon gave way to surprise.

The four men said they had hoped to reach Europe and were shocked to learn they had in fact landed on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brazil.

Two of the men have since been returned to Nigeria upon their request, while Yeye and Roman Ebimene Friday, a 35-year-old from Bayelsa state, have applied for asylum in Brazil.

“I pray the government of Brazil will have pity on me,” said Friday, who had already attempted to flee Nigeria by ship once before but was arrested by authorities there.

Nigerian migrants are rescued by Brazilian police as they sit on the rudder of a ship after crossing the crossing the Atlantic in this undated frame grab from video.

Both men said economic hardship, political instability and crime had left them with little option but to abandon their native Nigeria.

Friday said his journey to Brazil began on June 27, when a fisherman friend rowed him up to the stern of the Liberian-flagged Ken Wave, docked in Lagos, and left him by the rudder.

To his surprise, he found three men already there, waiting for the ship to depart.

Friday said he was terrified. He had never met his new shipmates and feared they could toss him into the sea at any moment.

Once the ship was moving, Friday said the four men made every effort not to be discovered by the ship’s crew, who they also worried might offer them a watery grave.

“Maybe if they catch you they will throw you in the water,” he said. “So we taught ourselves never to make a noise.”

Spending two weeks within spitting distance of the Atlantic Ocean was perilous.

To prevent themselves from falling into the water, Friday said the men rigged up a net around the rudder and tied themselves to it with a rope. When he looked down, he said he could see “big fish like whales and sharks.” Due to the cramped conditions and the noise of the engine, sleep was rare and risky. “I was very happy when we got rescued,” he said.

Father Paolo Parise, a priest at the Sao Paulo shelter, said he had come across other cases of stowaways, but never one so dangerous.

Their journey paid testament to lengths people will go in search of a new start, he said. “People do unimaginable and deeply dangerous things.”

The Lopé-Okanda Ecosystem, officially referred to as the Ecosystem & Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda, and more commonly known as the Lopé National Park, is an important natural reserve and park that is located in the central part of the Gabonese Republic.

Covering an area of about 4,910 sq km (1,900 sq mi), it was established as a wildlife reserve in 1946, so that it would be protected and established as a national park in 2002, where today it is still governed by the National Agency for National Parks.

The significance of Lopé-Okanda is in its unusual interface between dense and well-conserved tropical rainforest and relic savannah environments that include also a great diversity of species, among which can be found large and endangered mammals.

There are not that many other African parks and reserves that have so high a density of biomass, and Lopé-Okanda preserves a record of biological evolution over the last 15,000 years.

Due to the importance it has, in 2007 Lopé-Okanda Ecosystem was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list, and it is one of only five other ones also mixed sites that are satisfying the world heritage cultural as well as natural criteria of the organization.

Protecting one of the most diverse tracts of rainforest in the vast Congo Basin, this ecosystem is located more precisely to the south of the Ogooué River, and from the natural point of view there are some 84 species of mammals and 405 birds, including many little-known forest species.

Furthermore, the western lowland gorilla, mandrill, chimpanzee, and the endemic suntailed guenon, are more globally threatened species than any other sites alongside the Congo Basin.

From the cultural point of view, there have been found a number of old settlement sites, rock engravings that are more counted to be more than 1,800, iron work and other significant archaeological evidence of human occupation that can be traced back to 400,000 years ago, making the valley of the Ogooué River a crucial corridor for the Bantu People to migrate from West Africa to the Congo Basin forests and into eastern and southern Africa.

Today, the conservation of the Ecosystem & Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda is good, even though there are some concerns that exist with the density of the human population that pressures the subsistence use of the park’s resources, in addition to the commercial poaching, illegal logging, and major infrastructure developments in and around the park.

In conclusion, the Ecosystem & Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda is definitely one of a kind in Gabon that should be well protected so that the future generations would be able to get a glimpse in the mesmerizing nature the small African nation has to offer to the world.