I found one answer to this question, let me now if there is a better one.
As documented here assign your objects to the MongoDBManager - http://django-mongodb-engine.github.com/mongodb-engine/cool-stuff.html#included-mongodb-batteries
from django_mongodb_engine.contrib import MongoDBManager
class MyModel(models.Model):
objects = MongoDBManager()
Then you can do raw queries like this:
MyModel.objects.raw_query({'loc' : {'$near' : [50,50]}})
A different approach I guess would be to go directly to pymongo:
http://api.mongodb.org/python/1.10%2B/examples/geo.html
Finally I ended up with this query:
nearest = MyModel.objects.raw_query(
{'loc' : {
'$within' :{ #within .05 degrees of lat/lon
'$center' : [{'long' : long,'lat' : lat}, .05]
}
})[:10] #get up to 10 results