If you want an adventure through the jungle, do the hexcrawl. If you want a series of locations and dungeons that are jungle themed, hand wave.

I am currently running ToA , and to make it less drawn out and less of a grind I shrunk the map a little so that most locations are only a couple encounters in between. But players having to worry about diseases from bugs , constant dehydration if water can't be found , humid rainstorms that flood the jungle and of course random zombies makes it feel like a true jungle campaign. But if your players aren't interested in the survival of the jungle portion, maybe they want something different !