Long Distance Bus from NanJing to HuangShan

One of the most difficult things to plan when traveling in China is find long distance buses. This is especially true if you do not speak Chinese. There is an online bus search tool. But unfortunately is is Chinese only.

We wanted to book a bus from NanJing (南京) to Huang Shan (黄山). There are only a few results you get when using Google. So, I'll share the details about the bus we finally took on our trip.

We knew there had to be some buses to the scenic area in HuangShan. On the internet we only found some old websites about connections. None had current timetables. We asked at the hotel, but unfortunately they couldn't help us either. However, they told us that it is possible to buy bus tickets at all NanJing stations for any bus departing from the city. We got to the closest station and asked for the first bus the next day (we actually had the hotel staff write down what we wanted to ask in Chinese). There turned out the be a direct bus leaving in the morning:

Bus Number: KK8008
Date: 2012-09-07
Departure Time: 09:45 a.m.
Departure Station: NanJing South Station (南京南站)
Destination: HuangShan Scenic Spot (黄山景区)
Price: 97.0 RMB

The south bus station is in the same place as the high speed train station. If you want to know how to read a Chinese bus ticket, I scanned ours in and tried to translate most fields:

Once we had the ticket, the rest of the trip was easy. The bus station is connected to the subway system and we found the gate easily. The trip to HuangShan was a 5 hour non-stop trip with one short restroom break.