OLSR - the fight

To start OLSR on Android is not straightforward. Once you have it running chances are that multihop would not be working.

Necessary and important steps: you have to change the order of the routing tables. In particular "main" should come before "wifi"
-- put the local table at the end
ip rule add pref 1000 lookup main

that did the trick....

to check the content of the routing tables:
ip route show table