I created a dump with mongodump on computer A (ubuntu 12.04 server). I moved it to computer B (ubuntu 12.04 server) and typed:
mongorestore -db db_nam
On my distro "locale-gen" was not installed and it turned out all I had to do is set the LC_ALL environment variable. so the following command fixed it:
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
hopefully it will help someone else...