Authentication description

I spent several hours trying to connect with remote MongoDB database and authenticate with it. Finally I found in article: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/7270427645/design-of-the-erlang-driver-for-mongodb that I should do that: "encode your strings, as in `<<"hello">>` or `bson:utf8("hello")`". I think it's necessary to mention that explicitly or/and driver should take care of that.
What do you think?