There has been a lot research effort on developing reactive routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) over the past few years. Most of these algorithms consider finding the shortest path from source to destination in building a route. However, this can lead to some network nodes being more overloaded than the others. In MANETs resources, such as node power and channel bandwidth are often at a premium and, therefore, it is important to optimise their use as much as possible. Consequently, a traffic-aware technique to distribute the load is very desirable in order to make good utilisation of nodes? resources. Therefore a number of end-to-end traffic aware techniques have recently been proposed for reactive routing protocols to deal with this challenging issue. In this paper we contribute to this research effort by proposing a new traffic aware technique that can overcome the limitations of the existing methods. Results from an extensive comparative evaluation show that the new technique has superior performance over similar existing end-to-end techniques in terms of the achieved throughput, end-to-end delay and routing overhead.