In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol called the Cartography Enhanced OLSR (CE-OLSR) for multi hop mobile ad hoc networks (multi hop MANETs). CE-OLSR is based on an efficient cartography gathering scheme and a stability routing approach. The cartography gathering scheme is non intrusive and uses the exact OLSR reduced signaling traffic, but in a more elegant and efficient way to improve responsiveness to the network dynamics. This cartography is a much richer and accurate view than the mere network topology gathered and used by OLSR. The stability routing approach uses a reduced view of the collected cartography that only includes links not exceeding a certain distance threshold and do not cross obstacles. In urban environments, IEEE 802.11 radio signals undergo severe radio shadowing and fading effects and may be completely obstructed by obstacles such as buildings. Extensive simulations are conducted to study the performances of CE-OLSR and compare them with those of OLSR. We show that CE-OLSR greatly outperforms OLSR in delivering a high percentage of route validity, a much higher throughput and a much lower average delay. In particular the extremely low average delay exacerbated by CE-OLSR makes it a viable candidate for the transport of real time data traffic in multi hop MANETs.